When my American partner is overseas, her side of the bed tends to become a bureau, an odds-and-ends bowl, and a library (sometimes also a snack cupboard). Books press against me like a body pillow, not because it’s comfortable, but because my reading habits change. They keep stranger and longer hours. They ask for greater, perhaps distracting discontinuity between genres and styles and narratives. They ask, in short, for a lot of courtesies, unsustainable courtesies, and I grant them.

Omar Sakr’s first poetry collection, These Wild Houses, impressed me with the range and vulnerability of its lyric voice—at times prophetic, at times heartrendingly immature. Sakr’s follow-up collection, The Lost Arabs, admits the reader into deeper, more troubling, and more beautiful confidences. The central occupation of the book, and of Sakr’s practice more broadly, is identity in an othered body: what it means for the poet to write through the lens of Sydney’s Arab-Australian diaspora; what it means to grow up Muslim and bisexual and how it inflects poetic inquiry; how ongoing violence in the Arab world, often fanned by Western involvement, operates as a collective trauma the poet carries and writes towards. How to heed the urge, I feel Sakr asking, to find music in such pain, a lyric unity, and how also to interrogate, critique this urge?