Description

‘Wildly imaginative … There is a spectacular wizardry to her words’ Observer

‘Quick before the story ebbs away.
There are things I need to tell you’

A work of great strength and equal delicacy, Mouth transports us to a world where violence hangs in the air, where beauty, pity and cruelty intertwine. The sequence at its heart, Palace, takes the overlooked women from the edges of Greek tragedy and places them centre stage, to tell unforgettable stories of survival and loss. With new depth and force, their voices set off echoes with women navigating the terrible reality and aftermath of war today.

As a human rights lawyer, Arshi saw power and its abuses, the structures of silencing set against refugees. As a poet, she charts the movements and migrations that change the course of our lives – from child to adult, from home to elsewhere, from grief to what lies beyond.

Mouth is a complex and original study of speaking’s limitations, chasms in communication, but also the unexpected power of silence: ‘sometimes / language picks us clean’.

‘Beautiful, generous and empathetic … A poet at the height of her powers’ Bidisha, author of Asylum and Exile

‘Delicately lethal; sharp-eyed and tender’ Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young

Publisher Review

‘Delicately lethal; sharp-eyed and tender; Arshi’s poems speak with devastating tongues of the truths and injustices that the world would rather we did not hear, in a voice as nuanced and contemporary as it is resonant across time’ * Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young * ‘Some truths are hard to speak and even harder to discern. These rich and varied verses reveal truths that were there all along, uttered by women millennia ago, but waiting for the acuteness of Mona Arshi’s ear and the surety of her voice’ * Christia Mercer, Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University *