Review – A Dress of Locusts

A Dress of Locustsby Safa KhatibGenres: Poetry Pages: 64 Rating: Synopsis: Woven from threads of Aramaic, Spanish, Ancient Greek, Sumerian and Arabic, A Dress of Locusts is an unforgettable song cycle in which the living and dead sing back and forth to one another. Here, Safa Khatib journeys across the possibilities of language and self, asking us to dwell in the thresholds between the 'old' and the 'new'. There are some very striking images and strongly expressed scenes in Safa Khatib’s A Dress of Locusts (including the image that gives the title!), and I’m kind of sad I don’t like it more. The poems are very readable and easy to follow (except for one or two where I found the layout slightly annoying), but I didn’t really find my way in. A large part of that is the sexual content of the poems. I wouldn’t generally consider myself prudish at all, and of course sex has a place in poetry, but the way sex is treated in these poems — I don’t know. Each time it stuck out and felt like a…