A Red Cherry On A White-tiled Floor

Maran al-Massri is an Arab poet for the modern age. She writes short, seductive lyrics of astonishing clarity and piercing candor, stringing them together like pearls in a story chain. Her lines are anguished but tightly reined, breaking completely with traditional Arab love poetry to draw on everyday language as well as images and metaphors remembered and reinvented from childhood and the Koran. She was born in Syria.