Ante body

By Marwa Helal

*Recipient of a 2020 Whiting Foundation Award 

*Recipient of a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts 

*Recipient of a 2019 Jerome Hill grant from the Jerome Foundation 

*Author has taught or lectured at the Creative Writing Program at The New School, Eugene Lang College; Fordham University; Asian American Writers’ Workshop; and Cave Canem among other places. 

*Of interest to those interested in autoimmune disease, war, language/linguistics, psychology and migration. 

*Poems are informed by the diagnosis of both the author’s parents with autoimmune disorder and the author’s mother’s experience as a diabetes educator working with vulnerable communities and stories of recent immigrants being diagnosed with diabetes upon recent arrival to the U.S., as well as the high rate of diabetes in Indigenous American communities as well. 

*The poems use many forms including lyric, journalistic, hybrid-genre, formal, avant garde, narrative, investigative, musical, and prose poetry. Though written in English, Helal’s syntax relies on Arabic and other vernaculars. She has lived in many different cities and she transfers these experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders through language. 

*The framing of the book was inspired in part by a talk by Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance,” particularly around the concept of the “ante” 

*Poems speak to the author’s experience as an unveiled Egyptian Muslim woman, addressing feelings of personal erasure as well as those of the historical erasure of Africa and the so-called Middle East. 

*Poems explore the psychological impacts of migration as manifested in autoimmune disease. 

*Author writes at the intersections of racism and colonization. She is interested in how colonization conceals other histories of slavery including ongoing modern forms of global White supremacist abuse. 

*Author holds an MFA from The New School in Creative Nonfiction 

*Whiting Foundation Award, 2021 Poetry Fellow, NYSCA/NYFA, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), 2020 Honorable Mention: Invasive species, 2020 Arab American National Museum Book Awards Judge, Swarthout Prize, Arizona State University, Spring 2020 Writing Instructor, Cooper Union Saturday Program, 2019-2020 Judge, First-reader, Cave Canem 2019 Poetry Prize Writing Mentor, Baldwin House Urban Writing Residency, Twelve Literary Arts, Cleveland, Ohio Teen Arts Week: Poetry Workshop for Teenagers at 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center, New York, NY, May 2019 ,13 Grantee, PEN America for The Balakonah Project with Hayan Charara Editor, The Poetry Project Newsletter, 2017-2019 Fellowship, Cave Canem, Greensburg, PA, Summer 2016, Summer 2019 Fellowship, Calabash: The Conversation Literary Festival, Fall 2017 Judge, First-reader, The 2017 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, Kent State University Fellowship, Poets House, New York, NY , 2017 Finalist, Poetry Project: Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship Fellowship, Brooklyn Poets, Brooklyn, NY, Fall 2016 Winner, 2016 Biennial Poetry Contest, BOMB Magazine selected by Bhanu Kapil Immigrant Artist Program, Mentor, New York Foundation for the Arts, 2016, 2018 Immigrant Artist Program, Participant, New York Foundation for the Arts, Summer 2014 Workshop Teacher, RASMI: Arab-American Youth Writing and Arts, Brooklyn, NY, 2013 Arab American Book Awards, Judge, Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, MI, October 08-18

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightboat Books
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643621395

Book preview

be long

why I so wise

it wasnt so much a doubled consciousness, but more akin to a doubled gaze. i didnt leave my body when it would happen. but it was like i could see myself seeing them see me. and i must admit, i got a rise out of it: their feelings of insecurity. they were so obviously intimidated by the work they knew they could never do. and would never be able to make. this is how beasts are made.

oum kalthoum sings to the one i saw, before i saw, and the body before the body worries, she will tear the veil

on the floor of a dimly lit gym’s basketball court i learn pilates method was born in a prisoner of war camp

be long