Placing the Poet: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Postcolonial Iraq

Makes available, for the first time in English, the work of a major modern Arab poet, providing a framework for understanding his experience not only as an Arab writer but as a postcolonial one.

This is a comprehensive study of the most widely celebrated of twentieth-century Iraqi writers, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, whose premature death in 1964 from Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) was lamented in cultural circles throughout the Arab world. This book makes available to English-speaking readers for the first time an unprecedented amount of information about a single Arab poet (including a large selection of previously untranslated poetry). In addition, it places the poet’s work in the broader context of postcolonial resistance to Western hegemony, illuminating obscure aspects of his writing and relating it to other authors of his time.