Los Angeles Review of Books
To Remember, Read, and Return: A Conversation Between Omar Sakr and George Abraham
GEORGE: The last word of my final poem, in both its first and final draft, was 'stay'. It was the word I arrived at and returned to...I want to address that The Lost Arab’s final word is 'leave', like…We really did that psychically/telepathically? I’m curious to hear you talk about your relationship to that word, as it relates to your book and beyond the book even.
OMAR: The tension between 'stay' and 'leave' is so intense, but I think we’re both gesturing to our bodies, where we’ve been placed, how we are relating to that place, and to its abandonment. There are so many parallels between our books, and our last poems, they truly are siblings, dancing.
Beloved Immoralist: One Man’s Love of a Fictional Character
David Mason – former poet laureate of Colorado and current resident of Tasmania – recounts his father’s life. And also how his father fell in love with a fictional character from Joyce Cary’s novel The Horse’s Mouth.
A man dies, but a character lives. A man seldom wishes to be a character, but he becomes one anyway, the moment he is recalled. At the end, the spark of my father’s character gave only the faintest light. A restless spirit was reduced to something less than infancy, tinged with paranoia. 'I’m in hell,' he said from somewhere in the depths of dementia. Before then, what a character!