BOOKS
​
​
​
Songs for the Dead and the Living
When the ground beneath your feet is always shifting, how can you ever know where you belong?
Jamilah has always believed she knows where her home is: in a house above a paint shop on the outskirts of Beirut, with her large, chaotic, loving family. But she soon learns that as Palestinian refugees, her family's life in Lebanon is precarious, and they must try to blend in even as they fight to retain their identity.
When conflict comes to Beirut, Jamilah's world fractures, and the family is forced to flee to Cairo: another escape, and another slip further away from Palestine, the homeland to which they cannot return. In the end, Jamilah will have to choose between everything she knows and pursuing a life she can truly call her own.
Songs for the Dead and the Living is a coming-of-age tale played out across generations and continents, from Palestine to Australia. Through stunning prose, acclaimed writer and human-rights activist Sara M Saleh offers a breathtaking portrait of the fragilities and flaws of family in the wake of war, and the love it takes to overcome great loss.
The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el Banat
A stunning collection from Sydney poet, human rights activist, community organiser, and refugee campaigner Sara M Saleh.
With her first full-length poetry collection, Sara M Saleh introduces us to the polychromatic lives of girls and women as they come into being amidst war, colonial and patriarchal violence, and exile and migration. This searing work interrogates and represents the complexity of Arab-Australian Muslim women's identities as they negotiate an irresistible world full of music and family, grit and grief, love and loss.
Saleh's poetry is not only an inherently political act, but a deeply personal one, charged with multilayered conversations and meditations amongst three generations of women in Sara's family. Her poems dazzle with an incantatory force of spirit, survival and selfhood, proving without a doubt that Saleh is one of this country's most compelling, contemporary poets.
Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity
Although there are 22 separate Arab nationalities representing an enormous variety of cultural backgrounds and experiences, the portrayal of Arabs in Australia tends to range from homogenising (at best) to racist pop-culture caricatures.
Edited by award-winning author and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, and activist and poet Sara Saleh, and featuring contributors Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Ruby Hamad and Paula Abood, among many others, this collection explores the experience of living as a member of the Arab diaspora in Australia and includes stories of family, ethnicity, history, grief, isolation, belonging and identity.
Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word
Over the past decade, Spoken Word has established itself as a central part of contemporary Australian & New Zealand poetry. For the first-time ever, these voices are transported from the stage to the page, captured in print so that the spoken-word experience can be shared with a new and broader audience.
Solid Air showcases the work of more than 100 performance poets - combining elements of slam, hip-hop and experimental performance poetry - to deliver an unforgettable reading experience that is both literary and loud. Poems capture themes of modern culture, identity and resistance.
Sweatshop Women: Volume 2
An exciting and contemporary collection by First Nations women and women of colour heralded by ArtsHub as 'exceptional work'.
Sweatshop Women is a contemporary collection of prose and poetry written by women from Indigenous, migrant and refugee backgrounds. In this second volume, Australia’s most urgent new voices return to reclaim their stories of culture and sovereignty. Featuring Christine Afoa, Sydnye Allen, Maryam Azam, Ferdous Bahar, Flordeliz Bonifacio, Shankari Chandran, Janette Chen, Cindy El Sayed, Phoebe Grainer, Aseel Harb, Amani Haydar, Sheree Joseph, Meyrnah Khodr, Shirley Le, Abeny Mayol, Jessicca Wendy Mensah, Gayatri Nair, Lieu-Chi Nguyen, Sara M Saleh, Christine Shamista, Maryanne Taouk, Divya Venkataraman and Diane Wanasawek. Foreword by Ruby Hamad.
