Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a self-described queer Arab poet living in Montreal. Their work has appeared in many literary magazines and The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology.
Poetry
The Good Arabs
Montreal: Metonymy Press, 2021.
Will be ordered
Pubisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker’s communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.
The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.
Poetry / Essays / Letters
Knot Body
Montréal: Metatron Press, 2020.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Bringing together poetry, essay, and letters to “lovers, friends and in-betweens,” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch confronts the ways capitalism, fatphobia, ableism, transness, and racializations affect people with chronic pain, illness, and disability. knot body explores what it means to discover the limits of your body, and contends with what those limitations bring up in the world we live in.