Poets in Conversation:

How did Garden City come into being? Tell us a little about the origin, inspiration, or circumstances surrounding it.

The oldest poems in Garden City date back to 2020, and the most recent to 2025, so they span what feels like the second half of my life as a poet so far. I didn’t write these poems with a collection in mind; I was simply writing through a period that was, in hindsight, unusually dense with change. In those five years, I did my MFA at NYU, moved back to Cairo, got married; I spent time in Fayoum—a desert oasis I adore and often return to—and in Iceland, and plenty of time in my new home. Even though they came into being across different locations and moments, there’s a lot that holds these poems together, perhaps most prominently a tendency toward formal experimentation. Over time, I started to see that many of the poems were circling a central concern: the recurring movement between interior spaces (houses, bodies, dreams) and the city.

There are two more ways I could answer this question. I could say that Garden City has its roots in Cairo itself—the neighborhood the book is named after is where my mother was born, where my grandparents lived, and where some of my earliest memories are held. Or I could say the chapbook emerged when I saw the Beloit Poetry Journal call for the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series. I actually didn’t have a manuscript at hand that I wanted to submit, but the call prompted me to spend time with all the poems I had, and to think about how some of them may exist together. That process—of plucking, eliminating, and listening for resonance—was, in a major way, when Garden City truly took shape.

‍There is so much of the world in this project, yet it also feels deeply personal. How do you bring the same wide-eyed lens that you turn on the outside world into poems about the self? How can writers make “personal” poems intimate enough to convey a single speaker but open enough to offer a generative meeting of poet and reader?

I think I always resist, whether consciously or not, the pressure to make the “I” in a poem stable. I try to give in instead to uncertainty—to let the self remain in motion, or partially visible, or kaleidoscopic. I think my formal leaning toward fragmentation is one way I try to retain that slipperiness of self. I also love thinking about how that ethic of fragmentation brings you, as the reader, into the poem—when a poem takes the form of a list, or field notes, or a contrapuntal, it asks you to supply the connective tissue—to participate in assembling the self. My poems also pair that restlessness of form with language that is itself tenuous. I am especially drawn to questions, provisional language that enacts a kind of self-interruption, and dislocated or estranged syntax. And I think these are all ways in which poets can open up their work to a space of encounter with the reader, who is not given clear pathways to meaning: They come to be participants in its making. 

‍Garden City is the second chapbook of your own work published, but you’ve also recently translated two collections from Arabic. How does inhabiting roles of both translator and poet in the same season impact the way you think about language?

I think translating from Arabic has made me more aware that, even though I write my poems in English, I am always performing an act of translation. So much of my consciousness is rooted in Arabic—in its specific linguistic and cultural registers. I was born in Cairo and lived there until I was twenty-four, before moving to New York for the better part of a decade. Though it was in New York that I started writing poetry, almost everything I write is grounded in Egypt. And it’s not just a matter of subject or setting that I share a home with: The language itself seems to reflect that grounding. 

This is something Mona Kareem, a dear friend and one of the poets I have regularly translated from Arabic, once pointed out to me. “It’s as if the language in your poems is Egyptian—I can hear the Arabic in it.” Her observation stayed with me, and helped me recognize that the English I write is shaped, imagistically as well as structurally, by Arabic: I constantly lean into overly literal translations, and into carrying entire phrases across—even if their meaning shifts or if the resulting syntax is awkward. “I’ve noticed that in poems that move toward the documentary, or that try to hold political realities, the sentence sometimes becomes slightly strained or ‘awkward,’ but in a way that feels necessary to the truth it’s trying to carry,” Mona Kareem suggested in another conversation. 

‍What do you wish you'd known when you first began writing?

I wish I’d known I was signing up for a relationship—not unlike the kind one might have with a lover, or a sibling. There’s this persistent sense of obligation: I feel I owe my writing space and time, attentiveness, even devotion. And as a partner, writing is so often draining. Intrusive. Withholding. It doesn’t always respect my boundaries. I wish I’d known writing would sustain me, yes, but also continually make such excessive demands on my days and my inner life. 

‍When the BPJ editorial board gathers for selecting poems, it has been our tradition to cook and share soups and stews. Do you have a favorite comfort food (or food tradition) that sustains you? Would you be willing to share a recipe?

Here’s my (very simple) “Eggs With Dates” recipe:

Butter
Eggs
Pitted Medjool dates (two for every egg)
Salt and sumac to taste

Melt a small amount of butter in a pan, then add pitted and halved Medjool dates and let them soften and darken slightly. Once you smell heaven, crack the eggs directly into the pan and swirl them around so the dates are at home in the scramble. A little salt as they cook, and a dusting of sumac at the end. Can be served with bread or without, and an ideal side dip is Labneh. 

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