“Amira El-Zein has envisioned a mythic world of elemental substances—light, shadow, sea water, fi re—that collides with and interpenetrates our mundane world of war, displaced peoples and debased body politics. In her conviction that ‘We are fugitive figures / betraying our shadows. / We are commas / in the writing of others’, the Nakhba becomes a universal principle that no one of conscience can escape. In an extraordinary act of visionary imagination, she has transmuted the war-torn histories of Gaza and Beirut into a statement of desolation, fear, and tentative hope. Above all, the book commemorates the spirit of refugees all over the world forced to go ‘knocking on the door of dawn, / begging for a shelter,’ even as they are ‘the weavers / of the eternal return.’”
At the Hour of the Eclipse
by Amira El-Zein
Amira El-Zein’s At the Hour of the Eclipse captures the terror of a people displaced, cleaved from their ancestral lands, adrift and unanchored. Her stark, haunting poems sound a cry of bewilderment at senseless persecution and its attendant losses. They stand as witness and lament for those in exile who long only for the security of that most fundamental of human needs, home.
“Magnificent, heartbreaking cries of conscience! In poetry borne of pure soul and its haunting questions, Amira El-Zein writes urgently necessary poems in honor of the precious innocent children of Gaza who suffer so much and have died, through absolutely no faults of their own. This is the book we ache for on all our sleepless nights.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye
Amira El-Zein’s At the Hour of the Eclipse captures the terror of a people displaced, cleaved from their ancestral lands, adrift and unanchored. Her stark, haunting poems sound a cry of bewilderment at senseless persecution and its attendant losses. They stand as witness and lament for those in exile who long only for the security of that most fundamental of human needs, home.
Amira El-Zein
Amira El-Zein is an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at Georgetown University in Qatar. Author of three poetry books in Arabic, she recently published a volume of discussions with the eminent philosopher and Sufi Seyyed Hossein Nasr entitled The Return to the Eternal Abode (2025). Earlier work includes Creativity and the Sacred (2016) and Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn (2009). A prolific translator of Arabic, French and English, she co-translated Mahmoud Darwish’s seminal Unfortunately, It Was Paradise together with Munir Akash, Sinan Antoon, and Carolyn Forché. El-Zein has published numerous articles in refereed journals on an ample range of topics including Sufism, gender in Islam, Francophone literature, Arabian Nights, and contemporary Arabic poetry and fiction.
