Philip Metres stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can perform—from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to building a more just world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of his writing on poetry, he widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Listening ranges between expansive surveys of the poetry of 9/11, Arab American poetry, documentary poetry, landscape poetry, installation poetry, and peace poetry; personal explorations of poets such as Adrienne Rich, Khalil Gibran, Lev Rubinstein, and Arseny Tarkovsky; and intimate dialogues with Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah, and Micah Cavaleri, that illuminate Metres’s practice of listening in his 2015 work, Sand Opera.

Philip Metres is the author of nine books of poems, translation, and criticism. The recipient of a Lannan Fellowship, two Arab American Book Awards, and the Cleveland Arts Prize, among other honors, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Photo credit: Jeremy Zipple
 

"This is the critical collection we need today, as we’ve needed it every day—one that points to a lineage of poetry political, committed, alive. To listen to these poets—Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Khaled Mattawa, Mohja Kahf, and on—through Metres is to hear a practice of compassion and righteousness that is exemplary. I leave reading these essays and conversations as I often leave reading Phil Metres’s astonishing work: emboldened and awake to the possibilities of poetry as communal, as documentary, as song, as refuge and, yes, resistance."
—Solmaz Sharif, author of LOOK (2016)