Hedy Habra

Hedy Habra is a poet, artist and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections from Press 53, most recently In the Folds of Time, a surreal memoir; Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (2023), winner of the 2024 International Poetry Book Award and Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award; and The Taste of the Earth (2019), winner of the 2020 Silver Nautilus Book Award, honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and finalist for the Best Book Award. Her second collection, Under Brushstrokes, was finalist for the 2015 USA Best Book Award and the International Book Award, and her first poetry collection, Tea in Heliopolis, won the 2014 USA Best Book Award and was a finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the 2013 Arab American National Book Award’s honorable mention and was a finalist for the 2014 Eric Hoffer Award and the USA Best Book Award. Her book of literary criticism, Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa (2012), explores the visual and interartistic elements in the Peruvian Nobel Laureate’s fiction. Habra holds a B.S. in Pharmacy, and she earned an M.A. and an M.F.A. in English and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish literature, all from Western Michigan University where she has been teaching. A recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award, she won honorable mention from Tiferet and was finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Award. A twenty-five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her work has been translated into Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish and Turkish. Her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies, including Aeolian Harp Series, The Bitter Oleander, California Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, Connotation Press, Cutthroat, The Cortland Review, Diode, The Ekphrastic Review, Feral, Gargoyle, Hamilton Stone Review, Indelible, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The MacGuffin, The Mackinaw, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Macramé Literary Journal, MasticadoresUSA, MAYDAY, MockingHeart Review, The New York Quarterly, Nimrod, North of Oxford, One, On the Seawall, The Opiate, Panoplyzine, Peacock Journal, Poet Lore, Pirene’s Fountain, Puerto del Sol, SLANT, Solstice, Tiferet, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Vox Populi, and World Literature Today.

In the Folds of Time brims with intelligence and affect, and Hedy Habra is an electrifying, immensely gifted poet. —Khaled Mattawa

Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? weaves a mystery about a mystery—the yearning and its fulfillment (or not) of any lived life. —Rebecca Foust

These poems confess that image can hide the smell of blood and the smell of jasmine, both the terrible and the sweet in the story of a place. —Traci Brimhall

The poems, in verse and prose, in Habra's new collection, Under Brushstrokes, pay homage to the transformative power of art in the most authentic way possible—by demonstrating it. —Stuart Dybek

Hedy Habra's hospitable poems, lush with intricate landscapes of relating and remembering, are so rich they make me homesick. —Naomi Shihab Nye

Praise for In The Folds of Time

Hedy Habra’s In the Folds of Time is a dreamscape vortex of intersections, a spiderweb spun from the streaks of shooting stars—moments unmoored from their fixity in time. The poet is not simply elegizing le temps perdu, although a distinctly Proustian precision permeates these poems—a mourning for lost loved ones, for lives shadowed by illness and loneliness, for what time takes and memory cannot restore. At the heart of Habra’s imaginative world is a powerful dialogue with art. The great painters of the modern era and their works become interlocutors and guides: resources for seeing, remembering, and dreaming the world—its past, present, and future tense—into being. In the Folds of Time brims with intelligence and affect, and Hedy Habra is an electrifying, immensely gifted poet.

—Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas

Hedy Habra uses her finely tuned “poetic license to withdraw from linear time” as she explores love, loss, and her growth as an artist. As dizzying dreamscapes following a return to her childhood home after over fifty years give way to clear-eyed memories and affectionate portraits of neighbors, teachers, and family, Habra seeks to discern “what is really worth remembering.” From masterful pantoums to ghazals, each poem conveys the fierce wonder of Habra’s musings and fulfills her goal that “every written page [become] a beveled mirror erasing time and space.”

—Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, author Maumee, Maumee and Doom & Beauty

In the Folds of Time is a surreal collection filled with poems so personal that they become universal. Childhood, exile, maturity, wisdom—each verse is a splinter of experience, stirring in readers’ memories of their own childhoods, overflowing with tastes, shapes, and scents of distant homelands. Hedy Habra is a poet-magician conjuring up a cornucopia of dreams and visions to be read, cherished, and remembered. You will love this book commemorating generational loss, survival, and resilience.

—Maja Trochimczyk, Ph.D.,  President, California State Poetry Society

Hedy Habra's In the Folds of Time celebrates the variations and strangeness of life, until even our anxieties are a kind of song haunted by beauty. Under Habra’s alert gaze, life is charged with possibility—the “infinite ripples” of silks and faces that swirl into the colors of a painting or dream alleys. Habra’s riveting poems work toward peace without simplifying the world’s resplendent complexities, search for home within transformation, and honor the intelligence of ancestral women without being reduced to recipes and heartaches.

—Chad Sweeney, author of Little Million Doors

In the Folds of Time takes us through personal history where words burn like a prayer and dreams haunt like memories. Through family stories that move in a circle, these poems hold time in amber. Art—both made and witnessed—creates a lens for how people come to understand themselves and see the wild unreality of their lives. Hedy Habra creates a gentle interrogation of the past as memories wander through time and geography, bringing the writer—and reader—back to a sense of home.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal

Praise for Or Did You Ever See The Other Side?

Every Hedy Habra poem is a jewel of ekphrasis. She takes us deep into magic in these elegant, stunning poems. She layers language in a way that dances between brushstrokes, connecting words and images but also hearts and mystery. Habra shows us how art is an infinite world of possibilities. A dazzling collection.

—Lorette C. Luzajic, editor, The Ekphrastic Review, author of The Rope Artist and Winter in June

Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? weaves a mystery about a mystery—the yearning and its fulfillment (or not) of any lived life. Here, it’s the life of a woman whose exquisite artist’s sensibility enables her to escape a repressive paternalistic tradition. “It took me a while / to wake up from / a life not lived” she says in “Or Did You Think I'd Never Find The Way Out?” As mercurial as life, the titles of these accomplished pantoums, free verse, and prose poems all begin with that elusory and disjunctive “or,” and most are interrogatory, asking but not answering the big questions. They cast the subtle fabric of human aspiration against reality’s loom, making art that holds it all. “I am drawing a keyhole / to find my way / out of my own cell,” the speaker says. Reading that, and this moving book, puts a pen—and a keyhole—into the hand of the reader, as well.

—Rebecca Foust, author of ONLY and Paradise Drive

In this extraordinary new collection, Hedy Habra weaves a marvelous life tapestry through dreams and the language of memory— “the right words thrown / pell-mell in the folds of memory.” These ekphrastic poems are not content to interpret painting and music but transcend the border between poet and art. Habra explores each piece from multiple angles to discover its locked heart: “See how colors arise from heartbeats.” Then she searches for a key, but there is never only one key. Each poem asks a question that invites the reader to see another perspective, then another. This collection is kaleidoscopic, stunning, and wrings a haunting beauty from every brushstroke and musical note. Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? “soars without wings,” taking the reader on a journey into its breathtaking dreamscape.

—Luanne Castle, author of Rooted and Winged and Doll God

Internationally acclaimed ekphrastic poet Hedy Habra’s most recent collection is luminous and powerful in its exploration of women and art. Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? turns on a superb and often spellbinding use of anaphora exploring artists, muses and creative practice. Reminiscent of Anne Carson’s Short Talks, Habra composes poems as alternatives including on topics such as Half-Open Doors, Hot Flashes, Heartbeats, Fractals, Lovers’ Encounters on TV Shows, Ciphers, and Keys. These ultimately culminate in the question, “Or What Is Life If Not A Constant Carving Of Oneself?” Using diverse sources including art from Remedios Varo, Shiharu Shiota, and Wadada Leo Smith, this is poetry as “mobilis in mobile,” expressing haunting and indelible feminist voicings of women in art.

—Cassandra Atherton, Professor of Writing and Literature, Melbourne, Australia

Praise for The Taste of the Earth

The Taste of the Earth contains numerous histories—from Egypt's distant past to the Lebanese Civil War to the Arab Spring—though history is not “the straight line that accompanies silence.” These poems confess that image can hide the smell of blood and the smell of jasmine, both the terrible and the sweet in the story of a place. Habra also teaches us that it is not just language and maps that tell history, but that objects carry what they have witnessed, the truths they are waiting to speak.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade

In this lush collection, the force of the lyric brings imagination, witness, myth, and memory into an opulent confluence. With formal variation—from the Japanese haibun, to the Malay pantoum, to an abecedarian composed of Phoenician letters, to an intersection of the senses and mathematics via the Eye of Horus—Habra’s poems enact art as the process of “remembering and forgetting,/telling and retelling.” As the focus here, often, is war and its devastations, witnessed and remembered, The Taste of the Earth is rife with sorrow songs, but each is moored by the speaker as a beholder of earth’s beauty as it pours in through the senses and finds a home in language: “[T]he jacaranda’s blue light anchors me back,” Habra writes, “whispering, yes, it’s here, deep inside, fluttering like a dove’s wings.”

—Diane Seuss, author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

These are a painter’s poems, sensuous and filled with scenes under the surface. In her journey, Hedy Habra digs into the roots to find stories of wisdom. What’s special about these stories is that, even though they are painful, their exotic flavor is of earth, which belongs to everyone. They wander through memory and, image by image, settle in the soul “as sand in an hourglass.”

—Dunya Mikhail, author of In Her Feminine Sign

You may be sitting in your favorite chair at home when you begin to read Hedy Habra’s latest collection of poems, The Taste of the Earth, but that’s not where you’ll be. You’ll be in Damascus, Heliopolis, Beirut, Aleppo. Before you know it, as if dreaming, you’ll be gliding along the streets of these cities, listening to their sounds, overhearing bits of conversation. Born in Egypt, Habra is part of the diaspora of Middle Easterners compelled to leave lands they love due to war and upheaval. There is longing for home in every sense of the word—for a place, a person, a taste, a story, a particular light, a language, a gesture, a laugh. It is this longing that makes these poems universal, regardless of where you are as you read them.

—Susan Azar Porterfield, winner of the Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize for Dirt, Root, Silk

Praise for Under Brushstrokes

Hedy Habra’s Under Brushstrokes is a rich tapestry of images, sounds and meanings. Like any tapestry the complexity of weaving, the craft and artistry are often under or subliminal to the larger images, and in this way the book lives up to its title in that there is so much foundation that goes into the building of an image and giving the image not only meanings but breath and life itself. Enjoy Under Brushstrokes, it is meant to be read and read again.

—J.P. Dancing Bear, Editor, The American Poetry Journal 

The poems in Hedy Habra’s Under Brushstrokes amount to something more sweeping than simple ekphrasis. She makes no attempt to describe works of art, but instead uses them as points of departure for explorations of the dreaming psyche. The resulting meditations, often adopting the genre of prose poetry, retain the colorful imagery we expect in visual art, expressed in a language as precise as it is vivid.

—Alfred Corn, author of Tables

Under Brushstrokes is an astonishing collection of poems responding to art. Through Habra’s accomplished pen, these ekphrastic poems create an immediate world of rich textures and image, giving the reader intimate access to such diverse talents as Klimt, Guccione, Bosch, Tanning, and Hokusai. She explores the stages of art—from thought to modeling to canvas—revealing the layered connections between the individual and art itself. These are poems of depth and skill, of beauty and paradox, of “words suffused / in linseed oil,” as Habra writes—a marvel of a work.

—Sam Rasnake, Editor, Blue Fifth Review

In the poem "Brushstrokes," Hedy Habra writes "the painter raises inexorably the level of the waters, and the woman knows . . . she will only be fulfilled by drowning in the torrent." The poems, in verse and prose, in Habra's new collection, Under Brushstrokes, pay homage to the transformative power of art in the most authentic way possible—by demonstrating it.

—Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern

Praise for Tea in Heliopolis

The poems of Tea in Heliopolis form the story of a family, sometimes tragic, sometimes searingly beautiful, and always exotic, seen through the eyes of a painter. The trope of life, as moments flowing from the paintbrush wielded skillfully by a poet, allows Hedy Habra to capture details redolent of old masters, exquisite and visceral, and creates her remembered world with the wild imagination and color of a Van Gogh. Moving through life in Egypt, to Beirut, then to America, with a kind of post-Newtonian sense of everything happening simultaneously, the chronicle captures the bravery it takes to remember and yet experience a beauty transcendent to pain. This is a remarkable book of poetry.

—Diane Wakowski, author of Emerald Ice

Hedy Habra's hospitable poems, lush with intricate landscapes of relating and remembering, are so rich they make me homesick. Here are worlds, both ancient and modern, spun and sung in shining wonder.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Transfer

From Egypt to Lebanon to the freshwater coastline of Michigan, Hedy Habra's Tea in Heliopolis is a collection full of ancestral gestures, sensual imaginings, and songs turning unerringly into legend. Shapely, timeless lyrics that range from continent to continent, past to present, with a wisdom born of Rita Hayworth, African drums, and almond trees, Habra has a knack of turning phrases that make us reconsider our own place on earth. And in a prodigious and moving poem like "Raoucheh," she gives voice to a forcibly silenced people as only a true poet can. This is a necessary and rhapsodic book of poems.

—Ravi Shankar, author of Instrumentality

Tea in Heliopolis is an irresistible book, offering poems of exquisite charm and sensibility. Both cinematic and painterly, moving across vast swaths of ancient geography, Habra’s work brings to our senses the world of Lebanese parlors and Cairo streets, of women lost in prayers and men playing backgammon in tea houses, but she doesn’t stop there. With her wise and compassionate language she invites us to understand and share their lives. Cavafy and Adonis come to mind, but Habra is a poet uniquely herself. Led by her masterly pen we cannot help but respond to her invitation. Tea in Heliopolis takes you on a voyage richly textured with Old World mystery and New World urgency.

—Pablo Medina, author of Cubop City Blues