Best Seller
Paperback
$20.00
Available on Mar 02, 2027 | 112 Pages
From the “undeniable, unforgettable” (Kaveh Akbar) Zeina Hashem Beck, a profound new collection of mirror sonnets that explore the division and correspondence between selves and alternate realities experienced in exile
In This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, Zeina Hashem Beck once again reinvents the sonnet—this time not as a Shakespearean love poem or a Petrarchan ode, but as a post-colonial vehicle of the immigrant experience. Her chosen form, the mirror sonnet, bends language to resist the concept of a singular reality, of one world; because for many immigrants, there exist multiple realities: the world where they now live, and the world they left behind. Hashem Beck connects these experiences of trial and upheaval with her own move from Lebanon to California, but also with the reinvention of the body in middle age, with motherhood, and with the transformative power of love. She chooses to present forty sonnets because she immigrated to California at age forty, and because of the spiritual and cultural significance of this number. From cinemas to magnolias, from San Francisco to Beirut, this collection calls out a world that doesn’t make space for multiple realities, and yet simultaneously creates a world within itself which makes that existence possible.
In This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, Zeina Hashem Beck once again reinvents the sonnet—this time not as a Shakespearean love poem or a Petrarchan ode, but as a post-colonial vehicle of the immigrant experience. Her chosen form, the mirror sonnet, bends language to resist the concept of a singular reality, of one world; because for many immigrants, there exist multiple realities: the world where they now live, and the world they left behind. Hashem Beck connects these experiences of trial and upheaval with her own move from Lebanon to California, but also with the reinvention of the body in middle age, with motherhood, and with the transformative power of love. She chooses to present forty sonnets because she immigrated to California at age forty, and because of the spiritual and cultural significance of this number. From cinemas to magnolias, from San Francisco to Beirut, this collection calls out a world that doesn’t make space for multiple realities, and yet simultaneously creates a world within itself which makes that existence possible.
Author
Zeina Hashem Beck
Zeina Hashem Beck is the author of O (Penguin Books, 2022), which won the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry and was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s also the author of Louder Than Hearts (Bauhan Publishing, 2017) and To Live in Autumn (The Backwaters Press, 2014), as well as the chapbooks 3arabi Song (Rattle, 2016) and There Was and How Much There Was (smith|doorstop, 2016). Her debut nonfiction, Sublingual: Failing in an Other’s Language, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in fall 2027. Educated in Arabic, English, and French, Zeina has a BA and an MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. Her poem “Maqam” won Poetry’s 2017 Frederick Bock Prize, and her work appeared in The Nation, Lithub, the Academy of American Poets, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. She grew up in Lebanon and currently resides and teaches in the Bay Area.
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