“If culture lies in transmitted ways of knowing how to clothe society's needs in imaginative form, this monograph shows how a specific community of poetry fans turns culture toward ethical ends. Such a project underscores the centrality of anthropology and the humanities to studies of liberal political formations” (p. 456). So Flagg Miller concludes his richly descriptive ethnography of cassette poetry in Yemen. Based on ethnographic and linguistic research since 1995, Miller contextualizes the evolution and fluorescence of the audiocassette as a medium of poetic communication in the southern Yemeni region of Yafi’. Case studies are often ignored except by scholars with an interest in the specific area, but this should be an exception. He tells us much about the poetry, but his exploration of the political and social dimensions of the genre in a tribal area buffered historically by the British colonial presence in Aden, a socialist regime, and recently the nationalism of Yemeni unity, demands a wider readership. By privileging ethnography (4), the author demonstrates how the study of culture can be rescued from the proliferation of scholarly works that mainly focus on texts out of context.

Flagg Miller builds on Steven Caton's and Jean Lambert's earlier work on Yemeni poetry and song, but makes an original and substantive contribution in his analysis of a specific poetic form known as bid’ wa jiwab (initiation and response), a local form of the traditional Arabic qasidah. The choice of this genre is advantageous for several reasons: it is less understood than any other poetic form, is still in the process of evolving as an inter-textual combination of oral and writing skills, and carries moral and nostalgic resonance for Yemeni communities at home and in diaspora. Miller documents the form in detail, with a focus on Yafi'i poets he interviewed and observed, and famous poets discussed in the communities he visited. One of the most famous examples of the genre, a poetic pairing by Husain al-Haddad and Shaikh Bin Sab'ah, is analyzed in the text and is also appended in its entirety in transliteration and translation.

The author is a competent Arabist, assisted in the field by consultation with poets themselves. Beyond the linguistic aspects, Miller unravels the process of poetic construction for the medium of the cassette. His analysis extends beyond the poets and their works to a history of the recording process in the region and the industry as such. This includes study of cassette shops and interviews with their owners, including a famous shop in Aden with a wide selection of Yafi'i cassettes. There are only limited comparisons to other parts of Yemen in the text, though footnotes provide extensive guidance on relevant ethnographic research there.

Miller's style is a combination of ethnographic observation and critical commentary on the process of poetic dueling to foster a moral ethic that crosses the stereotyped divide between tribes and sedentary towns, and the pulls between nationalism and Islamic values. He sums up his broader theoretical contribution as “a semiotics of media apperception that hinges on authorship and graphic tropes” (454). The frequent references to critical scholarship (from Nietzsche to Gramsci and Judith Butler) may be difficult for beginning students to digest, but Miller is to be commended for grounding his case study in wider critical debates. Unlike some books that separate theory from the documentation, this one incorporates insights as they are relevant, although many are buried in footnotes. The length of the text is due in part to the depth of ethnographic detail, but also to each chapter's extensive notes.

The book's central thesis is that the cassette poem allows for its creators and audience an aesthetic form of moral resonance. By “resonance,” Miller refers to the creative tension produced by the nature of the medium itself, one that freezes an oral performance and may extend it over a large distance, but which also offers an opportunity to respond. The Yafi’ context suggests a “tribal metropolitanism” (188), in which tribal values and identity are expressed through oral performance undergoing new forms of inscription, notably the cassette recording. This stylistic heterogeneity of tribal discourses suggests that the stereotype of Yemeni tribes as “purely oral” should be replaced with a view that, rather than pigeonholing literary genres, recognizes the interaction of styles in the politicized grounding of local culture. The moral aspect refers to the sense of responsibility of the poet, the focus on character for both the local audience and the wider cultural context of Yemen, and indeed the Arab world.