Customer Reviews:

• "Nuanced...delicately, not overwhelmingly profound, this book is a great read. Endlessly exciting yet serious and activist." - Lillian Wollien

• "Farrah Sarafa calls herself a cultural hybrid because she is the American-born daughter of a Palestinian-born mother and Iraqui-born father. The questions she asks herself are poignant and understandable: Who should she grieve for? Who can she love and still be a loyal American? Farrah Sarafa's existence is skewed and conflicted by her circumstances. She is an Arab born in America, a woman living in a man's world, born with only one hand in a two-handed world. It is from these realities that she draws her poetic inspiration.

The final verse of "Blood, Sand, and Tears of a Young Boy" expresses clearly the poet's conflicted life. She loves American freedoms but grieves for those less fortunate:
      Desert souls, their tears are made of blood mixed with sand
      while I, American, laugh in pain
      at Charlie Chaplin going insane on the television screen.
      CNN bulletin interrupts my bliss with news of terrors
      about red and flaming wearers
      of suicide and contempt.
      My laughs push into cries
      and form a current for the Arabian Sea
      whose crystal salts perspire and become of me.
      Her waves undulate like snake-thin layers of blood thickened
      with sand and stone
      like a serpent's plea to be set free
      and to roam
      the Garden of Eden.
      America.

In "Aesthetic, Ascetic, or Anorexic?" she questions the deception and death she sees in our shared world and clearly states her preferences. She'd rather suffer horribly, personally, than be a helpless onlooker:
      I'd rather be hammered down by metal
      on the top of my head down
      and compacted square
      by the factory;
      I'd rather give my hand over
      to the spider-claw of the upper left pain
      and shrink to it -- into it, like dough --
      like a grape in the sun's reign.
      In pride
      I'd rather forbear the stain
      of self-starvation.

Farrah Sarafa lives the American way. She plays, watches TV, lives free. But she worries and shares the suffering of her parents' people from a distance. These verses from "Father Iraq, Mother Palestine" express her worry about grandparents and great grandparents. How can she be free when every cell of her being shares their inheritance:
      How can this happen
      How can this be
      That I will never see
      The land of my dear grandmother?

      I cry, I whine, abstaining
      From bodily pleasures
      emptying myself
      of the life deprived Iraq.

Ms. Sarafa is not an America-basher. She clearly appreciates the land of her birth. But like all of us in America who are not Native American Indians, our people came from other lands. Our ancestors sometimes suffered and died in other wars, on other continents. Wherever they lived and died, our ancestors are part of us today. Farrah Sarafa's poetry is a gentle reminder of that truth." - Review by Laurel Johnson - Midwest Book Review