This collection features poems from Al-Azzawi's six previous Arabic poetry collections and many new poems. Springing from classical Arabic poetry, his poems speak to political exile - cultural marginalization, and Middle Eastern and Western histories and mythologies. Al-Azzawi employs humor, melancholy and tenderness to celebrate new worlds of possibility.

Fadhil Al-Azzawi was born in 1940 in Kirkuk, Iraq. By the time he was fifteen, he was publishing poems in the leading Arab literary magazines in Beirut and Baghdad. Al-Azzawi currently lives in London.

Khaled Mattawa (Translator) is the author of a collection of poetry, Ismailia Eclipse, and the translator of two books of contemporary Arabic poetry, Hatif Janabi's Questions and Their Retinue and Saddi Youssef's Without an Alphabet, Without a Face.