Traveling Mercies

Traveling Mercies begins with the poet's family--those who emigrated from Lebanon, and those who remained behind, enduring their homeland's civil strife. His affinity extends naturally into intimate poems about Central American refugees with whom he has worked and Native American children who were his students. Whether he writes a transparent lyric, a resonant narrative, or a poem that proceeds through a series of cathartic images that can bring to mind Lorca's notion of duende, the language sings.