The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat

by Sara M. Saleh

A stunning collection from Sydney poet, human rights activist, community organiser, and refugee campaigner Sara M Saleh.

With her first full-length poetry collection, Sara M Saleh introduces us to the polychromatic lives of girls and women as they come into being amidst war, colonial and patriarchal violence, and exile and migration. This searing work interrogates and represents the complexity of Arab-Australian Muslim women's identities as they negotiate an irresistible world full of music and family, grit and grief, love and loss.

Saleh's poetry is not only an inherently political act, but a deeply personal one, charged with multilayered conversations and meditations amongst three generations of women in Sara's family. Her poems dazzle with an incantatory force of spirit, survival and selfhood, proving without a doubt that Saleh is one of this country's most compelling, contemporary poets.

Genres: Poetry, Australia, Middle East, Lebanon

96 pages, Paperback

Published November 28, 2023

About the author

Sara M Saleh is an award winning writer and poet of Palestinian, Egyptian, and Lebanese heritage, who has shared her work on stages from Brooklyn to Bangalore. Her work has been published in English and Arabic across dozens of literary platforms including Haymarket anthologies and the Guardian, and explores the experiences of Arab-Muslim women navigating faith, family, and cultural expectations amid dispossession and displacement.

Sara’s debut novel Songs For The Dead And The Living (Affirm Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the US Khairallah Prize for Literature and the Multicultural NSW Award at the NSW Premier's Literary Award, and co-won the Australian Society of Author’s Barbara Jefferis Award 2024.

She made history as the first poet to win both the Australian Book Review's 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2020. Her full-length poetry collection The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat (UQP, 2023) won the 2023 Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the 2024 Five Islands Poetry Prize, the ALS Gold Medal, and the ALS Mary Gilmore Award.

Sara made history in Australia as the first poet to win both the prestigious Peter Porter and the Judith Wright Poetry Prizes (2020-21). Sara is also celebrated for her work co-editing the groundbreaking anthology, Arab, Australian, Other (Picador, 2019) and her most recent co-edited collection, Ritual: A Muslim Poetry Anthology has just been released with Sweatshop. She is the recipient of the inaugural Affirm fellowship for Sweatshop writers, Nelima Sidney travel grant, Varuna writers residency, and Amant New York writers residency, among many other honours and accolades, reflecting her growing influence in the literary field.

Her poems, short stories and essays have been published widely in both English and Arabic languages, nationally and worldwide, including the Australian Poetry Journal, Overland, Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Reviews, Red Room, Kill your Darlings, Rabbit Poetry Journal and SBS among others. Her publications are also portrayed in anthologies such as the Sweatshop Women’s Anthology: Volume II, Racism, Making Mirrors, Solid Air, A Blade of Grass, Groundswell: The Best of Australian Poetry, Borderless: A Transnational Anthology of feminist poetry, and Another Australia.

Rooted in the belief that literacy is a tool for liberation, Sara has rallied communities of artists across continents to create sustainable, generative, and inclusive spaces for craft, connection, and critical consciousness. From co-founding the Muslim Poetry Project to leading workshops in countless classrooms, community spaces, and festivals around the world, Sara has uplifted thousands of (SWANA) storytellers in a predominantly Eurocentric culture.

Reviews

[F.M Papaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this poetry collection, Sara M. Saleh does not waste a single 'bayt' questioning, criticizing and pushing for the dismantlement of hegemonic power structures that have caused and continue to cause so much ruin in our world. Whether those are systems of oppressive via colonialisation on a large scale, or the psychological and physical exploitation of a woman's body and mind, Saleh shows what true strength looks like in this collection. There is so much history and hope in these pages. It's a gift to have read it.

[Woduz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't realise poetry could have you scream and gasp out of your chair, then cry for 30 minutes (but three or four or twelve times over)

the awe I have for these pages, how deeply written and felt they are

powerful
grateful

[poeticool · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book felt like a whatsapp groupchat/brunch/late night çay on the balcony with my homegirls in poetry form

[Niki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I attended the Adelaide Writers Festival a couple of years back. I tend to stray from these events because they unabashedly allow for two great writers to speak at the same time in different locations. Evil event organisers.

Anyhow, I chose to watch Sarah. A tumultuous time, filled with white people colonising the streets of Adelaide (surprise surprise) to protest for Palestine (actual surprise). While I appreciate the gesture, no. Don’t wave the flag of Lebanon and pretend to have an inkling of how it feels to be displaced. Don’t yearn for a safer Palestine when you blamed every Muslim for 9/11. Don’t colonise our fight, our tears, our pain.

In any case this collection was wonderfully painful. As I anticipated. While we are different kinds of middle easterners, we still are sisters, and these ongoing wars in our shaky countries affect us just the same. 

‘To be inches away from ecstasy, but not there yet,
is the infinitely cruel moment of the journey.
[However] to be on the ease of ecstasy, but not quite there yet,
is still ecstasy, an infinite moment of living hope.’

Someday. For some sort of peace. Someday.

[sawah · Rating 5 out of 5]

BRILLIANT.

[Kaitlan Sharpe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful and thought provoking. Each poem is laced with deep emotion and story.

[joy彡 · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for read palestine week and that one line 'Does a comma slow the chaos, or expand it?' is really cold man

[Zsa Zsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The pleasure of reading great poetry …

[Razan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I know this now, my being contracts and expands with the land, boundless.
I know this, too: if ancestral homeland gets me killed someday,
I'll die like our trees, standing up.”

- - -

"But who will hold you in the middle of a civil war? Nobody told you the cost of entering was losing your way back."

- - -

"Who spectacled us? Why did we watch?"

- - -

"The woman who takes her place in the world without permission is a dangerous thing."

- - -

“To exist in Diaspora is to exist within ambivalent, shifting fault lines, flamboyant and feeble. It is a continual conjugation of this hybridised Arab identity, faced with the double bind of racism and patriarchy as we ourselves perpetuate dispossession against the traditional custodians of this land [Australia].”

‘One is always at home in one's past,' writes Vladimir Nabokov. Perhaps more accurately, we are at home in the memory of our past. A version of it. Ours and borrowed.

And often the reality of this is a blurry picture of a past that can never be the present - or a past that never was.
We mourn past glories invoked by modern nationalism and liberation movements, and our inability to reclaim them…”

[Michelanellabolla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nei ringraziamenti finali di questa raccolta, l’autrice scrive: “In Arabic, Bayt is a word for house and a line of poetry. So perhaps poetry is the ultimate place for the exiled”. Credo sia già qui il senso di questa lettura.

Sara M. Saleh mi ha conquistata con la sua voce così forte, determinata, matura e fragile al contempo. È schietta, cruda, violenta, destabilizzante: tra le pieghe però si intravede una fragilità non indifferente, un timore di stare al mondo che, tuttavia, è costretta a sopportare con fierezza. Se non c’è speranza nel mondo né fiducia nell’umanità, cosa resta? Soltanto la forza, l’orgoglio, la resistenza. Rivendicare le proprie radici e la propria cultura. La propria dignità.

[sekar banjaran aji · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tahun lalu bertemu Sara di Ubud, dia bercerita soal bagaimana bangsa kolonial bekerja. Dalam buku ini dia pun bercerita hal yang kurang lebih sama. Hal yang menarik ialah bagaimana dia menujukan perjalanan bagaimana dia berubah menjadi pribadi yang sekarang karena tinggal di tanah bangsa lain. Soal bagaimana relasinya dengan kepercayaan dan agama yang jelas tidak lagi sama seperti di tanah asalnya.

Hal yang menarik dari Sara ialah bagaimana dia berpijak pada kemampuan menyadari privilege. Dia mengulang pernyatan Diaz bahwa membawa akar yang kuat jelas membuat spektakuler jadi wajar kalau kita capek.

Meski aku nggak suka dengan pandangannya bahwa jika perempuan membayar duluan itu sebuah kegagalan. Kami berbeda pandang soal feminisme tapi itu wajar.

[Dani Ringrose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both a love letter to females and Arab lands, and I love how these concepts interweave back and forth with each other.

Had been wanting to read Saleh for a while, and glad to start with this debut poetry collection. I wanted to immediately dive back in it to re-read quite a few poems, and share them with my girlfriends while on a beach in Lebanon.

"have closed my legs to someone I loved they left
and opened them to someone I didn't thrashed restless
against 600 thread count soft and the glow of my mobile
phone the only light I saw for days cried miserable by the
sea confetti of condoms and spliffs chafing my ankles
one week's earnings got me a break-up haircut bangs
that didn't suit my round face backed away from the
mirror plotted all the ways I could kill him with my
friends forensic scientists and lawyers so we would
get away with it"

[rebecca wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this collection by Sara. It challenged my perceptions of Muslim women, I felt shame at how Australians have treated our Arab refugees, I was pulled further into understanding the plight of Palestinians, and their connection to our own indigenous peoples.

My favourites are 'Reading Darwish at Qalindia Checkpoint', 'Live from Gaza', 'The Purging', 'Thistle [to lose a lover/country], and 'Love Poem to Consciousness'.

[Kirsten Bedford]

a collection of poems that I read for Read Palestine Week. there are a lot of great poems in here, very thought provoking and gut-wrenching.
one of my favorite lines is “I confront the bare iron grids, / they are bone waiting for skin, / the toothed bars not wide enough / to squeeze a single orange in.”
beautiful language to describe something so horrifying and painful as war and displacement.

[☾ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something I realized while reading this collection: we read poetry so our heart stays tender. Even though it didn’t turn into a full blown cry, but the tears I shed for this, the heart shaken for each line, the need to pause (and scream and breathe and let it seep through) every three poems. Suffocatingly beautiful. Transport me, transform me: I was deliciously flirted with, I savored every line.

[Ellen Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 - a beautiful collection of poems - most of them gut wrenching, all of them emotional. My favourites were “All the places my father lost his faith”, “There are no colonisers in this poem”, and “Love poem to consciousness”.

[Pierce Morton]

A broad cross section of experience here, enjoyed the changing of styles to match the content while maintaining a strong voice, draws on many sources and will definitely require multiple readings for me.

[Natalia Figueroa Barroso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poignant poetry for and by Palestine and the Arab diaspora that reverberates inside you for eternity like a liberation chant at an invasion day rally.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some powerful poems.

[0m4!m · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems make me cry a lot, especially when read by Sara.

[Ziyy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Because I read her later-but-debut novel first, reading this felt like revisiting the ‘heroin’ I knew. It’s nostalgic and breaking my heart (again).

[Emilie · Rating 5 out of 5]

simply have never gravitated towards poetry but this book was so good I will have to reconsider

[Kate Larsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary collection of poetry about colonisation, migration and the complexity of Arab-Australian Muslim women’s identities

[kaitlyns_library · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this one.

[dinda ☁️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I am an Elegy before my Body”

[dangerous at every speed · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Does a comma slow the chaos, or expand it?"

"What the Greek gods tell of their immortality, I believe about loneliness"

hard as hell

[Sasa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"there are no colonisers in this poem"

i feel like i don't even have the right words. what an impactful collection of poems by a palestinian-egyptian-lebanese artist.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very solid poetry collection

[Natasha (jouljet) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A personal, political, punchy, brazen, revealing and generous collection of poetry about displacement, diaspora, and girlhood.

[Deb Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some powerful pieces in here and wonderfully descriptive turns of phrase. I particularly liked A Poetics of Forgetting, Little City, The End of the World and Love Poem to Consciousness.
Some bits and pieces also here:

P8 “the way the rich gorge on the world”

P44. “Who spectacled us? Why did we watch?”

p67 “…the barbecued smoke eats at the sky…”

p67 “I really feel the mark of progress when I tick the check box - or what I call fresh material for writing”

p14 “ I can’t afford to trust the morning, I am still learning to believe it when it comes.”

p89 (from Nabokov) One is always at home in one’s past.

“To exist in Diaspora is to exist within ambivalent, shifting fault lines, flamboyant and feeble.”

p104 (from Gregory Orr) if we are not supposed to dance, why all this music?