Zaatar Diva.

Zaatar Diva by Suheir Hammad Cypher Books, February 2006 $12, ISBN 1-892-49467-1

The debut release in the Cypher Books series (an imprint of Rattapallax Press) is Hammad's first collection in a decade. Included is a 21-track CD, giving life to many of the most ardent poems in the collection, including a reading of "Daddy's Song" tenderly featuring Hammad's father.

Hammad's new collection is a testament of sight, a sensual reflection on our current times. These are poems driven by sinew-memory; ethereal and sometimes translucent; Hammad takes the reader from street to sky. Laced with ancestral invocations and the confluences of polity, these are forthright poems that pound with heart rhythms, ooze with street love and call for a brazen fist.

Included are several powerful poems on family, land and love. Perhaps, most notable are two pieces after the Egyptian singers Abdel Halim Hafiz and Om Kolthom. In "Sawah" she writes, "If you by chance / come across my beloved / remind him of me / of these eyes and these hands ... simply remind him / we are poets each / of us travelers between / history and hope."

Nothing is taboo in Hammad's world. All that is sacred remains.

--Reviewed by Matthew Shenoda Matthew Shenoda is the author of Somewhere Else (Coffee House Press, 2005) and teaches at San Francisco State University.