BPL Book Prize Book Club: The Wild Fox of Yemen
In honor of the 10-year anniversary of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, we are celebrating all year-long with book clubs featuring past winners. This meeting, we will be discussing 2021 fiction/poetry winner The Wild Fox of Yemen: Poems by Threa Almontaser.
By turns aggressively reckless and fiercely protective, always guided by faith and ancestry, Threa Almontaser’s incendiary debut asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival.
A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser’s polyvocal collection sneaks artifacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures. Half-crunk and hungry, speakers move with the force of what cannot be contained by the limits of the American imagination, and instead invest in troublemaking and trickery, navigate imperial violence across multiple accents and anthems, and apply gang signs in henna, utilizing any means necessary to form a semblance of home.
The Wild Fox of Yemen fearlessly rides the tension between carnality and tenderness in the unruly human spirit.
2021 BPL Book Prize Winner: Fiction/Poetry
You can place your copy on hold here, and don't forget to check out our Bklyn Book Club Kit featuring discussion questions, research guides and author interviews!
