Transfer

By Naomi Shihab Nye

"In the current literary scene, one of the most heartening influences is the work of Naomi Shihab Nye. Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life."— William Stafford

Dusk

where is the name no one answered to

gone off to live by itself

beneath the pine trees separating the houses

without a friend or a bed

without a father to tell it stories

how hard was the path it walked on

all those years belonging to none

of our struggles drifting under

the calendar page elusive as

residue when someone said

how have you been it was

strangely that name that tried

to answer

Naomi Shihab Nye has spent thirty-five years traveling the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. In her newest collection Transfer she draws on her Palestinian American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her extensive travel experiences to create a poetry collection that attests to our shared humanity.

Among her awards, Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart prizes. In January 2010, she was elected to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Aug 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781934414651

Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and she spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than forty years traveling the country and the world, leading writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty books. Her books of poetry for adults and young people include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (a finalist for the National Book Award); A Maze Me: Poems for Girls; Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners; Honeybee (winner of the Arab American Book Award); Cast Away: Poems of Our Time (one of the Washington Post’s best books of 2020); Come with Me: Poems for a Journey; and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Her other volumes of poetry include Red Suitcase; Words Under the Words; Fuel; Transfer; You & Yours; Mint Snowball; and The Tiny Journalist. Her collections of essays include Never in a Hurry and I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven. Naomi Shihab Nye has edited nine acclaimed poetry anthologies, including This Same Sky: Poems from Around the World; The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems from the Middle East; Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25; and What Have You Lost? Her picture books include Sitti’s Secrets, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, and her acclaimed fiction includes Habibi; The Turtle of Oman (winner of the Middle East Book Award) and its sequel, The Turtle of Michigan (honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award). Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Award, and ""The Betty,"" from Poets House, for service to poetry, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry-reading series in the country. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials, including The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, and she also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been affiliated with the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin for twenty years and served as poetry editor at the Texas Observer for twenty years. In 2019–20 she was the poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine. She is Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and in 2017 the American Library Association presented Naomi Shihab Nye with the 2018 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award. In 2018 the Texas Institute of Letters named her the winner of the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement. She was named the 2019–21 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Naomi Shihab Nye is professor of creative writing-poetry at Texas State University.

Book preview

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Table of Contents

TRANSFER

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

I

History

1935

Bats

I Don’t Know

Scared, Scarred, Sacred

Haunted

Valley

Storyteller

II - JUST CALL ME AZIZ

Everything in Our World Did Not Seem to Fit

My Life Before America Had No Toilet Tissue

We Did Not Have Drinking Water in the Middle of the Ocean

Is Misery Near Kansas, I Asked

Many Asked Me Not to Forget Them

A Kansas Preacher Called Me Muscleman

I Hate It, I Love It

When One Is So Far from Home, Life Is a Mix of Fact and Fiction

Being Back with the Family Is Quite Wonderful but Terribly Exhausting

Member of the Tribe

Fifty Years Since I Prayed or Thought in Arabic

III

Knowing

Dusk

Thirsty

Amir & Anna

Mall Aquarium, Dubai

The Only Democracy in the Middle East

War

Maximum Security

Remembering William Stafford

Strange Shirts on the Same Day

The Burn

Strict

Real Estate

Tiny Cucumbers

Swerve

Where Are You Now?

Archive

Won’t You Still Love Me When I’m Dead?

Hello, Palestine

For Aziz, Who Loved Jerusalem

Undone

Love You Love You Love You

Sandhill Cranes at the Platte River

IV

Alive

Moment

The Young Poets of Winnipeg

What Will Happen?

Morning Birds

Lying While Birdwatching

Where Were We?

Dear Mediator

Eye Contact with a Squirrel

Family Love

You Are Wanted in the Office

Dallas

Muscat Sundown

Burlington, Vermont

For Mutanabbi Street

Mystery

Endure

V

Later

Window

Savigny Platz

Footstool

Bleibtreustrasse 31

Last Wishes

Ringing

Call to Prayer

Cinco de Mayo

Chicho Brothers Fruit & Vegetable #1

Chicho Brothers Fruit & Vegetable #2

Frankly

Father’s Day

We Can’t Lose

Mom Gives Away Your Ties

WAR is RAW Backwards & Forwards

Able to Say It

Comfort

Bees see your face as a strange flower.

At the Block Island Ferry

Wavelength

Acknowledgments

About the Author

BOA EDITIONS, LTD. AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES

Colophon

Copyright Page

001

TRANSFER

In Loving Memory of Our Father, Aziz Shihab

Aziz

Our father

who was always our father

not always our father

Refugee

not always

once a confident schoolboy

strolling Jerusalem streets

He knew the alleyways

spoke to stones

All his life he would pick up stones

and pocket them

On some he drew

faces

What do we say in the wake of one

who was always homesick?

Are you home now?

Is Palestine peaceful in some dimension

we can’t see?

Do Jews and Arabs share the table?

Is holy in the middle?

Introduction

… then I will begin with you that hesitant conversation going on and on and on.

—Alastair Reid, My Father, Dying

My father wanted us to write a book together. A dialogue, he called it. But he kept sending me monologues by e-mail and fax. Rants on topics I’d heard him discuss many times—frustrations, difficulties, peculiarities of a long life-in-exile. Perspectives on this and that.

He was already on dialysis. I would have done anything he wanted.

I tried to respond to what he sent, but he’d send another monologue instead. He wouldn’t answer questions. There was no continuity.

So what is a dialogue, Dad? I asked. Where is the back and forth?

You’re letting me down, he wrote. You’re not doing it right. I want to do it, but you’re refusing.

There was no thread.

So now he’s immigrated again, to a country beyond sight, and I keep talking. Two weeks after he died I carried a stack of incomplete notebooks from his messy office to my messy office.

Now what? I said. Can you hear me? Are you anywhere? I’ll type up some of your lines, your spare and elegant English longhand, and see if—anything answers. It may not work but I’m thinking about how—what can I do?—became your anthem.

It was the empty cup you held out with a trembling hand. Something might come along.

It’s not so much that I want him still here for me. It’s that I can’t stand the thought of the world without him in it.

He loved the world. The world frustrated him endlessly, but he loved it and hoped for it.

He’d step out of his bedroom each morning with flair, as if onto a stage. Freshened face, clean shirt.

Hello my friend! to people he encountered. I wonder now if this were his method for deflecting possible racism or rejection. Hello friend! to every waitress and shoe salesman.

Reviews for Transfer

[alicen3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The power in this collection is that t it represented well the way teens may come to have a change in their perspective of their parents. Suddenly it becomes apparent which parts of your life have been influenced, "haunted" by this constant watchful presences especially in the work "Haunted". I think this would be interesting to consider for YA works as they come to understand the intricacies of life that they were previously unaware of.Furthermore throughout the work the complex works challenge the concepts of family relationship and what it means to grow up in a culture that I was unaware of myself. This exposure to works that extend beyond the known are crucial for the development of young adults as it allows them to consider a world that extends beyond their own. Overall, what this collection of poetry gives most is the idea of hope for the masses.

[plasticatoms · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

4Q, 4Q. (Why am I giving everything four stars? There needs to be more gradations here. Five is perfect and three is mediocre, so almost everything gets four by default. Anyway.)Poems about (and some by) the author's father, a Palestinian displaced by Israeli occupation who later emigrated to the US. The horror of being driven from one's home is conveyed with passion and conviction, yet without demonizing the Israelis so much as painting them as actors in an ongoing tragedy of oppression and reprisal which has enveloped all cultures across human history ("We have suffered too much thanks to everyone, but you are the only ones we can touch"). The rather despairing tone of much of the book is leavened with bits of joys or meaning found in slices of life; a good book to demonstrate that cynics can be happy too, if we appreciate the small things.