Philip Metres has written twelve books, including Fugitive/Refuge (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and Sand Opera (Alice James Books, 2015). Winner of Guggenheim and Lannan fellowships and three Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University. He believes a just peace for Palestine and Israel is possible and requires our participation.
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Letter to the Citizens
The tank is on the tree lawn,The missile in the mail. But don’t be afraid. Go on Clipping your toenails.The glacier’s in the icebox,The river’s in the tap. No worries, […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
First Snowfall
too soon, and too soon for this old ache of longing and hunger and ruin that is this flesh, the I wantingto holdout a little longer, in silvermist and new […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
What Is Peace
But a horse breathing in a field.Behind her shoulders, invisibleWings fold like umbrellasWaiting to meet the rain. Behind each of us, invisibleFutures hurry to catch our train,As we stand to […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
The Fields
After Etel Adnan’s Champs de Petrol in the net a mother I want to hidework joints board hold close from metwist & sup a dusty city your soft this netport […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Philip Metres Introduces Paige Webb
Since my first encounter with Paige Webb’s poetry, I have been struck by their original relationship to language. Like some of their favorite poets—Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Emily Dickinson—Webb finds […]
Nonfiction
Mar/Apr 2021
The Peace Walls
On a street where Protestants and Catholics once torched each other’s houses a generation ago, Noel and Danny — men who fought on opposite sides of the bloody Troubles — look each other straight […]
Of Today
Jan/Feb 2020
why are there stars?
because we need to know even the dark dome hovering above us its infinite black like our skull seen from the inside like a bowl of onyx filled with cracks […]
Nonfiction
Jan/Feb 2020
The Last Soviet Poet
Twenty years ago, I was lost again in Moscow, circling identical white multistory apartment blocks in a panic, trying to find the legendary avant-garde poet Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov. I was […]
Poetry
Jan/Feb 2019
Checkpoint
each day I enter with open / papers & snake the coiled wires & barbed cattle chute / Qalandia / & bunker sand -bagged heads / to study the very […]
Poetry
Jan/Feb 2019
Isdoud (for Fady Joudah)
dear descendant of the dis appeared you ascend the pillar of your own air spin & span whole abysses with lines translating there to here & here to where wind […]
The Longer Lyric
Nov/Dec 2016
Duets: A Film in Stills
1 his legs mot ion s low as if he lives this mov ie s till by still while she lies legs to sky and scissors the pink-swathed light to […]
Nature's Nature
May/June 2016
Personal Climate Change
Then flesh is a kind of earth, and falling a failed flying. If we ourselves are a climate and the mind a watery organon what be the body’s firmament upon […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2015
Palæstinae quatuor facies [1720]
Near the entrance of the library, inside a display case: a book of the history of the Christian Church, written in Latin. This country exists as the fulfillment of a […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2015
Kufr / Yar, Babi / Qassim
all Yids of Kiev city must gather heading back to the village from the harvest and bring your documents and valuables and some rode horse-drawn carts / others, bicycles if […]
Poetry
Sept/Oct 2015
[]
you there between things and the words for things for a taste of your mouth I forsake gorging for giving this my body to your body always but suddenly between […]
Mar/Apr 2018
(More) News from Poems: Investigative / Documentary / Social Poetics On the Tenth Anniversary of the Publication of “From Reznikoff to Public Enemy”[1]
“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / Yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”[2] These familiar lines from […]
May/June 2017
My Life with Barge Haulers on the Volga
An excerpt from The Flaming Hair of Fate: Life Among the Russians I can’t recall the first time I finally saw Barge Haulers on the Volga, the arresting painting by […]
Fall 2013
The Iraqi Curator’s PowerPoint
You can see the footprints around the hole The Iraqi Curator said. They smashed the head Because they could not lift it from its base, This statue of Nike. It’s still missing.
Philip Metres
Philip Metres is the author of Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015), and To See the Earth (2008). A two-time recipient of the NEA and the Arab American […]