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’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with 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 to Michigan, and break down dichotomies portrayed in Western media: 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.
Tarik Dobbs (b.1997; Dearborn, MI) is a writer, an artist, and a Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Tarik’s poems appear in the Best New Poets and Best of the Net anthologies, as well as AGNI, Guernica, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Tarik helps run poetry.onl, and served as a guest editor at Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America as well as Zoeglossia: A Community for Poets with Disabilities. Tarik received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Minnesota, and is currently an M.F.A. fellow in art, theory, practice at Northwestern University.
Publication date: June 11, 2024
LIVED HERE
POEM WHERE EVERY BIRD IS A DRONE
DUPLEX: MY BROTHER WAS BORN BOTH ALLY & COMBATANT
THE WIRE
PERSONA POEM AS AMERICA
NAMESAKE WITH NO HISTORY FOUND
THE POET CONSIDERS THEIR ROLE
DRAGPHRASIS: ALEXIS MATEO CALLS HOME THE TROOPS WITH A DEATH DROP
DEAR PRE-QUEER LOVER,
REFLECTION IN STAINLESS STEEL MIRROR DIORAMA WITH ACCORDION FOLD
RONDEAU: IN 1990 ONE SUNSET EQUALIZES THE LIGHT BETWEEN A CHECKPOINT
CONTROL ROOM AND A DARKENED HALL TO REVEAL THE SILHOUETTE OF AN ISRAELI
SOLDIER
HOME ON THE RANGE, GAZA STRIP
DECONSTRUCTING MY BIRTH
WHEN MY MOM RENTED A HOUSE ACROSS THE STREET FROM A DOLLAR GENERAL
X-RAY DIPTYCH IN BEN GURION AIRPORT
SKY BRIDGE RENDERING ABOVE MINNEAPOLIS & THE WEST BANK
SON THROWING STONES IN THE STREET
ANTI-DRONE NIQAB MADE FROM SILVER
MAD HONEY
MY UNCLE WHO DIED OF AIDS PROBABLY
EVERY MORNING I TAKE A BUS THROUGH THE WEST BANK, MINNEAPOLIS
FLY INFESTED HOUSEPLANT
BRACELET OF SILENCE
PERSONA POEM AS IN-HOME DRONE
NUB
A DJINN HUMS IN SAKHNIN
PARADE IN GAZA: THE MODEL IS ABOUT TO BE BURNED
LANDAYS: ON EID AL-ADHA, MEN ON TV TIE A LENGTH OF MANILLA ROPE
EVERYTHING MY FATHER TOUCHES
THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD CONSIDERS HIS CLOSET
FINALLY WRITING THE POEM
NUB (ORIGIN STORY)
A SYNDROME RECEIVES HIS LIFETIME SERVICE AWARD
ON IRAQ WAR VETERANS
PORTRAIT WITH UNKNOWN DIMENSIONS
THAT JULY, MY SITO CALLS FROM DAMASCUS AT MIDNIGHT
NOT AN EXIT
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
"In their compelling debut Nazar Boy, Tarik Dobbs writes across and against the borders of race, class, ability, and sexual orientation—the checkpoints wherein the body is scrutinized, surveilled, and othered in ways meant to define and contain. This book demands a reckoning—both personal and national. In the precise mirror of these poems we find both the darkness and its necessary illumination, a way to confront ourselves."
—Natasha Trethewey, author of The House of Being
"Nazar Boy (with its visual, lyrical, political, and spiritual ferocity) is one of the best debuts in recent memory. Do I mean spiritual? Yes, I feel the shape of my own soul when I read Tarik Dobbs’s work. From war and within war, with love and hammer, long hope and deep memory, Dobbs crafts a weapon of a book that will cut you deep and good. May this work ignite us towards freedom."
—Danez Smith, author of Homie
