Nazar Boy

by Tarik Dobbs

From one of the most imaginative and radical voices in contemporary poetry, a debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism. 

Tarik Dobbs’ work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs shows an awareness of the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer; they challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching, and exquisitely crafted. 

Dobbs’ poems blur and collapse narrative distances within and between places, from the Levant region to Michigan, and break down dichotomies portrayed in Western between Arabness and whiteness, intellectualism and the working poor, Muslimness and queerness, disability and desire. By turns irreverent and serenely gentle, Dobbs calls us to speak, to dream, and to imagine beyond those distances so that we might speak, dream, and imagine better versions of ourselves, our relationships to each other, and our places in the world.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

100 pages, Paperback

Published June 11, 2024

About the author

Tarik Dobbs (b. 1997, Dearborn, MI) is a writer, artist, and Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.

Poems by Dobbs have been featured in the anthologies Best New Poets and Best of the Net, as well as in AGNI, American Poetry Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others.

Dobbs is the director of poetry.onl and has served as a guest editor at Mizna and Zoeglossia: A Community for Poets with Disabilities.

Dobbs holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and an M.F.A. in art, theory, practice from Northwestern University. Dobbs is assistant professor of English in creative writing (poetry) at Southwest Minnesota State University.

The debut poetry collections by Dobbs, Nazar Boy (June 11, 2024) and Dearbornistan (2026), are from Haymarket Books.

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

after writing a good review for orher things i feel bad for leaving a boring review here despite this book being good! i liked the oddities of form and the critique and presense of the surveillance state.

[Gunnar Lundberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Nazar Boy” straddles the line between origin story and elegy. Surveillance—and its many arms—permeates the collection. The poems, like tiny blind spots, offer an opportunity not to reflect, but to expose the world at its most inhumane & violent. A staggering read.

[yamina · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful, harrowing, artful. weaves together time / place / war / queerness / race / post 9/11 realities in such a human way. AI could never

[theperksofbeingmarissa ;) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up. My favorite poem from this book is "Portrait With Unknown Dimensions."

[Siani-Simone A · Rating 2 out of 5]

very smart book about poetry and i can recognize the worth and radical movements in the words, structure, and form of these poems but also say that i did not enjoy this as much as i wish i did.

[Dana]

Dan taught me to read through pedagogical lineage.. so you can see Dobbs is Douglas Kearney’s student

[Khepre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Punchy, poignant, and demanding. Excellent use of form throughout the poem, elevating it rather than distracting. Dobbs writes with such conviction that every word feels dynamic and commanding.

[Naaaaa Yaaaaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

vaguely haunting and consistently thought provoking + super interesting exploration of language and culture through manipulation of word/sentence formation and structure