Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Shibboleth—the code at the border, the password that marks who belongs and who doesn't, the tongue that gives you away—has always been a political technology. In their full-length debut, Filipino-Jordanian poet and former political communications strategist Dujie Tahat turns the shibboleth inside out, asking what it means to carry, in the body, for themselves, for and in search of their people, a word that was never meant to be spoken.
This formally deft and ravenous collection moves through a range of invented and inherited forms—the box, prayer, erasure, palimpsest, ghazal—to traverse the distance between legal doctrine and daily language, citizenship and belonging, the spiritual and material, the immigrant body and the texts that police it. In erasures [and reverse-erasures] assembled from the United States Constitution and American folklore, through Islamic prayer and Filipino expatriation, inheriting the traditions of Abrahamic faith and contemporary politics, Tahat’s poems, regardless of territory or legal status, locate the grammar of exclusion hiding inside the grammar of liberal democratic civil society.
At once incendiary and precise, political and devotional, Seattle Civic Poet Dujie Tahat denies the ease of any single cohering narrative—of immigration, of divorce, of faith, of fatherhood, of queerness—and offers instead a collection that demands the reader's full labor of interpretation. Shibboleth is not interested in being legible to power. It is interested in creating and re-creating a form of being in order to make new ways of living possible.
— Donika Kelly
"Is erasure a poetics of decomposition, where like the body, language reveals its mortality, or is the reverse true, that our vulnerabilities, our frailty, make possible and visible a hidden beauty? In Dujie Tahat’s Shibboleth, one assumes many postures of surrender. Out of fear, in pursuit of pleasure, or in acknowledgement of the Divine, we stand, we sit, we bow, we make holy the script of ourselves, almost as if the body has its own syntax, its own grammar. Here, what it means to become legible to a larger world is both an act of self-love and a clapback to power. Like faith, these poems challenge as they unfold. Recognition is re-cognition; what we understand is intertwined with memory. Nothing vanishes; nothing is ever fully erased. This book is whole and all consuming."
— Amaud Jamaul Johnson
"In Shibboleth, Dujie Tahat has created a textured reclamation of their many peoples, cultures, languages, and histories—reflective, loving, careful, but never cautious—earning, in full, the lodestar of its title."
— Marwa Helal
"To read Dujie Tahat’s glowing poems in Shibboleth is to be made freshly aware of the complicated blindspots and supple revelations of language itself. I am reminded of the poet Lyn Hejinian’s phrase about open texts: “all elements of the work are maximally excited.” Tahat’s thoughtful, generative lyrics possess this fraught and fountaining energy. They embrace a dynamic subjectivity, one that is unafraid to be found imperfect or particular or shifting, while seeking an ethics in the history and politics we are living through. Filled with storm and calm, this book is full of transport."
— -