Arab on Radar

by Angele Ellis

Poetry. ARAB ON RADAR is Angele Ellis' first book of poetry. She was a prizewinner in the 2007 RAWI Competition for Creative Prose for "Desert Storms," an excerpt of a novel in progress. ARAB ON RADAR was written in response to a post-9/11 world. This first book of poetry reclaims the author's Arab-American identity, and reaffirms the power of imagination in the wake of political and personal crisis. Her poetry has been published in Mizna and Pittsburgh City Paper, and is forthcoming in Grasslimb and Voices from the Attic, Volume XIV (The Carlow University Press). Angele also is co-author of the diversity workbook Dealing With Differences (Corwin Press). Angele Ellis has been named as a recipient of a 2008 Individual Creative Artist Fellowship by the Pennsylvania Arts Council.

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 2007

About the author

Angele Ellis is author of Arab on Radar (Six Gallery), Spared (A Main Street Rag Editor's Choice Chapbook), Under the Kaufmann's Clock (Six Gallery), and co-author of the diversity workbook Dealing With Differences (Corwin).

A 2008 recipient of an Individual Creative Artist fellowship in poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Angele's haiku appeared on the marquee of the Harris Theatre, after winning Pittsburgh Filmmakers' 2009 G-20 contest.

Angele's awards also include finalist in the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Contest and third prize in both the 2020 and 2018 Poetry Super Highway Contest. Both of these large, international contests are judged anonymously.

Her poetry, fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in over ninety publications and eighteen anthologies. She is a staff reviewer for Cultural Daily and Vox Populi, and a contributing editor for Al Jadid Magazine.

Reviews

[Angele · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I learned from writing this book is to value "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"--as Wordsworth called poetry--as well as to shape and channel the overflow.

Family, history, politics, madness, and lost love are common themes, not only in the sense of being ordinary, but in the sense of springing from a common past. To write a poem that speaks to another person--across space and time--is like the best sort of conversation, in which one experiences flashes of revelation about oneself, the other, and the world.

[Kelly Lynn Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellis shows that the Arab experience in America was rotten long before 9/11 in a tone that is more revelatory than chastising. Survivalist rather than vindictive.

All the poems in this collection are solid, but my favorite was "Through the Looking Glass" for the lines: "Living backwards made us giddy. / It is only now that memory works / both ways. / Which of us dreamed it-- / those from the country of nights / five times as warm as cold / or those who turned away and woke?"

[Saleh Razzouk]

I do not claim i had read every word of this elegant book. But i had a chance to read many poems out of it.
It is a nostalgic approach to both.. the poetic sensitivity and the themes. Always memory is powerful and in control.
You can say an active memory not an idle one since it tries to reconstruct the past on the account of the present.