Al Jazeera Features Yemeni-American, Walt Whitman Award Winning Poet Threa Almontaser

Threa Almontaser's debut poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf), is set to be released in April 2021. Abubakr Al-Shamahi notes, at Al Jazeera, that "politics plays a central part in Almontaser's poetry." From there: 

For her, poetry can help overcome "empathy fatigue", and reach people who find it easier to ignore political events when they are delivered through traditional mediums. 

"Mixing poetry and politics is crucial when faced with a sense of social powerlessness that can set in after one too many stories about, say, Uighur Muslims in concentration camps, or white nationalists on the march," she says.

"What poetry can do is make some of these phenomena vivid and personal in a way we're not used to. If the language we hear on television broadcasts no longer stirs us to do anything more than tweet our dismay, poetry can express something new, and this can energise us to take action." 

That is something that can be seen in the work of the poets Almontaser cites as her influences; the celebrated Mary Oliver, Palestinian-American Naomi Shihab Nye, and the Saudi Bedouin poet Hissa Hilal. But it is probably the work of the late Yemeni poet Abdullah Al-Baradouni that has had the most impact on Almontaser, so much so that she has dedicated portions of her forthcoming book to translations of his work. 

Read on at Al Jazeera.