Good Arabs, The

Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker's communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.

https://lambdaliterary.org/2021/09/septembers-most-anticipated-lgbtq-literature/

https://www.cbc.ca/books/45-canadian-poetry-collections-to-watch-for-in-fall-2021-1.6125796

https://49thshelf.com/Blog/2021/08/09/Most-Anticipated-Our-Fall-2021-Poetry-Preview

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch's exceptional The Good Arabs is an invitation to consider the 'cost' of living one's truth and what it might mean to remember what has always been known. Their work holds an intimacy as if we are overhearing a phone conversation or the author speaking on a balcony above us. 'Noises impossible in English' come through here, wrought in a mind attuned to tenderness and present conflicts. This is a bold and deeply necessary work. I am better for having read it. -Liz Howard, author of Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent

"Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch's The Good Arabs is a map of what it means to be queer, to be trans, to be Arab: from the hope of revolution to the Lebanese garbage crisis, of whiteness and its weight, of public space and private space and of eating pumpkin seeds on a summer balcony when the power is out. Even at its heaviest, this is a collection that insists on joy and on embodiment, reminding us that resistance can look like shaking one's hips to Nancy Ajram, too." -Zeyn Joukhadar, author of The Thirty Names of Night