Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Fiction, 2014

Wanting in Arabic is a refusal of convenient silences, convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictions of a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurations of lyric, ghazal, l'ecriture feminine, and, in particular, her own sexed voice. Without a memory of her father's language, the questions her poems ask are those for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with childhood.

Braiding theoretical concerns with the ambivalences of sexed and raced identity, with profound romanticism,Wanting in Arabic attempts to traverse the fantasies of foundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order to further a poetics of a conscious partiality of being, of generous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecognition.

Born in Halifax, Trish Salah is the author of Wanting in Arabic (TSAR 2002, 2013) and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 (Roof 2014, Metonymy 2017) and co-editor of special issues of Canadian Review of American Studies 35.2 (2005) and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.4 (2014). The 2013 edition of Wanting in Arabic won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. At the University of Winnipeg she organized the conferences Writing Trans Genres: Emergent Literatures and Criticism and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres. Currently an assistant professor of Gender Studies at Queen's University, she is a member of the editorial boards of TSQ, Eoagh, and Topia.

Trish Salah's profile page

• Winner, Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Fiction

"The poems are routes one might take to reach home in your own body, mind, history, and landscape. They vibrate with longing and tenderness." --Kerry Clare, 49th Shelf

"Employing a number of different poetic modes, Salah's writing is by turns political, evocative, and quite often hot. A Lebanese-Canadian from Nova Scotia who never saw her father's homeland nor spoke his tongue, Salah explores the nuances of identity, and her writing is simply gorgeous." --The Walrus

"[Wanting in Arabic] shares a cultural experience rarely made available to mainstream American audiences." --Buzzfeed

"Wanting in Arabic is a self-impelled keening for identification with a lost tongue, both that of her father's Lebanese roots and her own metamorphosis ... cross-citing psychoanalytic and feminist wagers about the sexed text ... with glam-porno rubber-assed apostrophes to various lovers (not a poetics of celibacy, I assure you), with the funny and poignant savvy of postcolonial theory.... This indeterminate and determined voice chronicles the trans-self's journey as a tour et retour de force.... With ethical toughness and carnal ecstasy, Salah's writing bosoms up every damn dam in the literary waterway." --Margaret Christakos, The Globe and Mail

"This is a beautiful and disturbing collection of poems, writing from the uncharted langscape of the third sex. Images of the rose, of the beloved, can they be made new? Yes indeed, Wanting in Arabic does just that." --Mary Di Michele, author of Debriefing the Rose

"Trish Salah's poetic sequence is not simply a narrative of gender change; it's a wandering, thoughtful text, one both fierce and tremulous." --Erin Mouré, author of Furious and Domestic Fuel