Praise for These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit"Whether chronicling Arab American experiences of discrimination or relating uncomfortable episodes in a marriage, these poems favor an honesty that will elicit laughter if it doesn't make one cry . . . These surprising and transgressive poems confront the everyday contradictions of living with equal parts biting insight and grace."-Publishers Weekly
"Politics, philosophy, and what it means to live in America are all themes that are highlighted and pulled apart . . . Charara both turns away from traditions and keeps to them, making for many unexpected moments . . . A powerful and impactful collection."–Booklist"[Charara] is a multifaceted writer, equally comfortable in the long, languid line and the short poem, terse and biting. His fourth poetry collection, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, shows off his range . . . Charara offers few answers but insists the questions themselves are worthwhile."–Shelf Awareness, Starred Review "Strange and dazzling . . . You can almost see the mind leaping from lilypad to lilypad, each transition both an outgrowth of the previous sentence and yet also deliciously surprising."–Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's"This entire collection dances between the direct and the subtle, at once using language that is both unflinching and delicate, both emphatic yet restrained. These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit is a complex and stunning collection that exemplifies Charara's incredible ability to write about life's complexities with grace and curiosity."–Marissa Ahmadkhani, The West Review"Charara's precise and imagistic poems will delight"– David Starkey, California Review of Books
"In this collection, the process is not centered on the poet, but is made of a constant, lively, and sincere contact and combination with the larger community that is the world."–Lúuacute;cia Leão, RHINO Magazine
"Hayan Charara's These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit is both lushly transcendental and companionable, imbuing the cathedral on fire, the match that set the fire, and the spiders under the pews, with an equal measure of significance and holiness. Charara has developed a level of mastery–in life and in poetry–that allows him to shift from litany to epic to haiku sequence to elegy to hybrid prose, from the enigmatic to the declarative, the tragic to comic, from Lebanon to Detroit, with agility, clear in his judgments ('I'd much prefer spending an afternoon / with a bunch of jockeys or car mechanics than with philosophers') and steadfast in his global and personal rage and grief. 'Every seed a heart, every heart / a minefield, ' he writes. In this way, Charara's astonishing collection defies easy dualisms and locates the source of love and violence in these, those, this, and that–and in ourselves."–Diane Seuss"Reading Hayan Charara's These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, I kept thinking of a line from Gwendolyn Brooks: 'A man must bring / To music what his mother spanked him for / When he was two.' Charara's music is undeniable. His searching lyric, which has been a lodestar for me over the years, crescendos here at dazzling new heights. A man has a hotel liaison with an ex-w
