Huda J. Fakhreddine spends little time defining what a prose poem is in The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice. She is rather interested in what poets writing in Arabic have been doing with their poetry since the first prose poetry manifestos appeared in 1960. “[N]either a survey nor a literary history of the prose poem,” she explains that the book offers instead “a close reading of the work of a select group of prose poets who reflect well the diversity, tensions and potentials/potentialities of the prose poem project in Arabic” (255). By avoiding an analysis based solely on the copula, Fakhreddine provides scholars of modern Arabic poetry with a lively and provocative account of what poets writing in Arabic have been up to for the past seventy years.

While the focus of The Arabic Prose Poem might initially seem to be a departure from her first monograph, Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition: From Modernists to Muhdathun (Brill, 2015), which largely treated poetry from the Abbasid period (r. 750–1258), readers will quickly realize that Fakhreddine brings her critical eye for the metapoetic to this most recent project as well. Her analysis of what prose poets do with poetry develops alongside a sustained engagement with contemporary poetic criticism about the prose poem in Arabic. These inquiries frequently allow Fakhreddine to expose the contradictions between what poets say about prose poetry and what they actually do when they try to write it. She explains that Adonis's (b. 1930) “very first attempt at a prose poem,” a translation of a section from Saint-John Perse's (d. 1975) Amers, ends up “deviat[ing] from […] those stipulations that Adonis himself and his contemporaries theorized in their manifestos” (70). Throughout the book, Fakhreddine explores tensions such as these as part of an extended “critical reading exercise” of the whole tradition of Arabic poetry, from the premodern to the modern, in which “we take the prose poem with us as a critical lens as we go back to reimagine the tradition” (42). Fakhreddine turns this lens on several poetic projects throughout the book, addressing the prose poem manifestos of Unsi al-Hajj (d. 2014) and Qasim Haddad (b. 1948) alongside that of Adonis as well as those of many other poets—including in particular Muhammad al-Maghut (d. 2006), Mahmoud Darwish (d. 2008), Salim Barakat (b. 1951), and Wadiʿ Saʿadeh (b. 1948)—who have dealt with conceptions of the prose poem.

Fakhreddine's combination of an analysis of the critical tradition in Arabic and her readings of prose poems is refreshing. She not only exposes significant shortcomings in critical analyses of prose poetry in Arabic (her critique of Khalida Saʿid's readings of al-Maghut are of particular note), but she also helpfully downplays the importance of “western models introduced through the translation of poetry and theory into Arabic” (3). Fakhreddine's treatment of “the chaos of terminology, which is partly due to translation” (17) is enlightening in this regard as she makes a point to explain the disconnection of English “free verse” or French “vers libre” from Arabic shiʿr ḥurr (lit. “free verse,” even though it retains meter), also referred to as qaṣīdat al-tafʿīla, a poetry that “adopts the foot (al-tafʿīla) instead of the two-hemistich verse (al-bayt) as its metric unit” (18). Both the qaṣīda (the poem) and shiʿr (poetry) continue to haunt the development of the prose poem, but in ways quite different than they do tafʿīla poetry. “The prose poem is,” Fakhreddine eventually deigns to use the linking verb, “the first proposal that insists on declaring itself poetry without meter in Arabic. Although this might seem like a superficial and minor deviation to us today, it, in fact, defies a long and established distinction between poetry and prose in the Arabic tradition” (18). Another highlight is the book's focus on the debates that went on within the Arabic critical tradition, for instance, between certain “free verse” poets like Nazik al-Malaʾika (d. 2007) and Ahmad ʿAbd al-Muʿti Hijazi (b. 1935) and proponents or practitioners of prose poetry.

By focusing on these debates, Fakhreddine shows the multifarious nature of modernism in Arabic. “This approach,” she proposes in her Introduction, “serves to upset the illusion of a monolithic ‘Arabic modernism’ by breaking it down into modernist positions with multiple visions and proposals for what the modern Arabic poem can be” (3). She strings this idea throughout the rest of her analysis, which likewise studies various poets’ “postures” or “attitudes” toward the prose poem as much as it does their prose poems themselves (6). As part of this approach, Fakhreddine takes up al-Hajj's “insist[ence] on the poem as a deliberate construction (bināʾ) […]” (16). In her Afterword, she returns to this fruitful term, bināʾ, writing that the prose poem “invites us as critics and readers of Arabic poetry to revisit our understanding of structure in poetry (bināʾ) and use that to arrive at form” (254). By resituating her analysis of the prose poem beyond just form and taking up what poets and poems do, Fakhreddine models a productive new way of thinking about modernist poetry more generally while at the same time not falling into the trap of an investigation interested only in poetic content. In fact, I would go further to suggest that an examination of bināʾ across modernist poetries in which al-ʿarūḍ (the Arabic science of prosody) and Arabic poetic genres were previously standard, like Persian, Turkish, and others, would produce useful results. By way of example, the Iranian modernist Nima Yushij (d. 1960) makes a point to refer to the poem as a “banā-yi khayālī,” an “imaginary structure,” in his 1938 Persian poem “Quqnūs” (The Phoenix). Thinking about bināʾ first and its relationship with form could indeed help us better understand what happened to these poetries, and not just the prose poem, during the twentieth century.

A bold step forward in critical analysis of Arabic poetry, The Arabic Prose Poem challenges us to move beyond debates over origins and influence by taking up instead questions of writerly and readerly practices that work together with poetry and the poem to explore how poets do what they do. Bolstered throughout by close readings of the most prominent prose poets writing in Arabic and effective, thorough citations of relevant scholarship in English, Arabic, and some in French, Fakhreddine's book is both engaging and thoroughly researched. The translations of poetry are generally well done, if somewhat literal. By way of example, I would change the rendering of “sa-uṭliq al-raṣāṣ ʿalā ḥanjaratī” from “I shall place a bullet in my throat” to “I will shoot myself in the throat” (122). The inclusion of block quotes from poems in the original Arabic script throughout is to be commended.

Separate from the book's content, one issue remains. There are several unfortunate mistakes in the copyediting, such as “Chapter 3 traces trace Adonis's ventures […]” (8); “S. Khadr Jayyusi” replacing “S. Khadra Jayyusi” (136); “Moving one” in place of “Moving on” (214); “text move towards their” and not “texts move towards their” (219); “al-mutawaḥish” rather than “al-mutawaḥḥish” (165); and “Tamyyiz” instead of “Tamyīz” (237). Having reviewed two books and read many others in the same series, I must note that this lack of attention to spelling, transliteration, and other simple matters is a pattern and therefore does not seem to be the fault of the authors. In light of this and other recent experiences I have had when reviewing my own article and chapter galleys, we may be due for a serious reckoning with basic editorial practices within the field of Arabic literary studies in English.