Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1993 - 2015

by Yahia Lababidi

From Yahia Lababidi, a celebration of more than twenty years of poetry that, according to Chard deNiord, Poet Laureate of Vermont, ..". resonates in plain-spoken yet dazzling poetry-sometimes epigrammatic, sometimes expansive-that betrays the eclectic transmissions of his myriad influences, from Hafiz to Kierkegaard, Dickinson to Kafka." From the Press 53 Silver Concho Poetry Series, edited by Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root.

Genres: Poetry

204 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2016

About the author

Yahia Lababidi is an Arab-American writer of Palestinian heritage and the author of sixteen books of poetry, aphorisms, essays, and conversations, including Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024). His new book is If You Cannot Say Genocide (New Village Press, 2026) Essays on Conscience and Witness.

His forthcoming book Wherever You Are: Essays from East to West (Ayin Press, 2027) is available for pre-order. A cross-cultural meditation on art, faith, and moral imagination, it moves between figures such as Nietzsche, Kafka, Rumi, Ghazali, and the poets of Palestine.

Recent books include On the Contrary: Wilde and Nietzsche (Fomite Press, 2025), a playful meditation on two kindred contrarians, and What Remains to Be Said (Wild Goose Publications, 2025), a gathering of aphorisms written across three decades.

Lababidi’s writing has appeared in Liberties, Salmagundi, The Threepenny Review, Sojourners, World Literature Today, The New Arab, and DAWN, and has been featured on PBS NewsHour, NPR, and On Being. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he has spoken at Oxford University and served as a juror for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund.

His work has been translated into numerous languages and read at literary festivals across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and India.

Reviews

[World Literature Today]

"Mystical and modern, Yahia Lababidi’s Balancing Acts, a collection of poems spanning across a career of decades, tethers together a spectrum of concepts seemingly distant yet connected in a fashion nothing short of revelatory. For Lababidi, a notebook is as adequate an allegory for a Platonic parable as litter is to the overwhelming amount of “discarded people” throughout every civilization. It is often in Lababidi’s simplicity that his verses resonate, unveiling a mind as in tune with contemporary society as an ancient sage with the unscathed wild." - Daniel Bokemper

This book was reviewed in the May/August 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Zeyn Joukhadar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Diaspora, exile, and loneliness twine through these poems like a silver thread, but there is hopefulness in these words, too. Lababidi is a rare talent.