Khaled Furani's detailed and scholarly study takes us to the unattainable heart of poetry, whatever its category, out of which comes magical beauty.
Maryse Conde
Columbia University, author of Segu and Victoire: My Mother's Mother
A provocative, innovative interdisciplinary inquiry into the relevance of both poetry and Palestine, this is a book for those pursuing Middle East studies, anthropology, and comparative literature . . . Highly recommended.
B. Harlow
CHOICE
This is a wonderful ethnography of contemporary Arabic poetry. Khaled Furani has made a significant contribution to a relatively neglected territory in the study of the secular. Silencing the Sea enlarges our understanding of the way modern pressures and seductions have led to the undermining of older sensibilities and the formation of new, and of how this process is reflected in Arabic poetry. This not simply a book for literary specialists, but for anyone interested in thinking about the different dimensions of secular experience.
Talal Asad
City University of New York
Khaled Furani's Silencing the sea is a beautifully crafted, sophisticated exploration of the pursuit of a secular modernity among Arab poets . . . Furani has written a captivating, 'grand' book that will stimulate and inspire a wide community of readers.
Michelle Obeid
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Furani's illuminating conversations with contemporary Palestinian poets connect us to their differing understandings of their art and its changing forms. He locates these expressive choices in an analysis of secular currents and with respect to the predicaments of Arab life in Israel and under occupation.
Brinkley Messick
Columbia University
Especially in the North American context, this book will seem both exciting and unfamiliar in its approach, like an occasionally recurring dream in which poetics gives itself the latitude that other genres have long adopted. Furani's work helps to develop a methodology for a global poetics-as a social poetics that rereads the schemes and tropes of poetry and the genealogies of national poetries in the light of postcolonial, transnational, and global forces. Silencing the Sea stimulates excitement for alternative genealogies and literary histories, mappings of the world republic of letters that (at last!) include poetry in their cartographies of power, influence, circulation, and inequality.
Walt Hunter
College Literature
Silencing the Sea is good news: It ironically speaks of the redemptive power of the human word, as fractured as it can be, as opposed to the Divine word's overwhelming power. It engages the battle for secularism that Arab poets, in particular, are leading, as it is for them, and their societies, an existential and crucial issue. Furani follows their meandering poems, and thoughts, through strengths and imperfections, while answering implicitly Hoelderlin's famous question: 'What are poets for in these destitute times?' by seemingly saying that by changing themselves these poets do change the world, at least by making chinks in the wall.
Etel Adnan
author of Master of the Eclipse and Sitt Marie Rose