2 Guys On Holy Land

The Story

The poetry of Walid Bitar is a bracing antidote to the decorous meditations and maudlin confessions of much of modern American poetry. Sharp, engaged, and darkly funny, Bitar's poetry explores the conflicts and tensions inherent at the intersection of traditional Western modes of thought with modern geopolitical realities. In his first collection, Bitar employs a supple language in a bitingly satiric mode. Bitar's poems are vividly animated by the playful use of American vernacular. He is attempting, he says, to 'move towards a language with the energy, the range of references, and the humor of cabaret.' But beneath the joking and punning there is a darker current of real power, a telegrammatic vision of the tragic consequences of miscomprehension, of the limits of language and human communication, of our inevitable isolation within our own skins.