Shibboleth

Shibboleth—the code at the border, the password that marks who belongs and who doesn't, the tongue that gives you away—has always been a political technology. In their full-length debut, Filipino-Jordanian poet and former political communications strategist Dujie Tahat turns the shibboleth inside out, asking what it means to carry, in the body, for themselves, for and in search of their people, a word that was never meant to be spoken.

This formally deft and ravenous collection moves through a range of invented and inherited forms—the box, prayer, erasure, palimpsest, ghazal—to traverse the distance between legal doctrine and daily language, citizenship and belonging, the spiritual and material, the immigrant body and the texts that police it. In erasures [and reverse-erasures] assembled from the United States Constitution and American folklore, through Islamic prayer and Filipino expatriation, inheriting the traditions of Abrahamic faith and contemporary politics, Tahat’s poems, regardless of territory or legal status, locate the grammar of exclusion hiding inside the grammar of liberal democratic civil society.

At once incendiary and precise, political and devotional, Seattle Civic Poet Dujie Tahat denies the ease of any single cohering narrative—of immigration, of divorce, of faith, of fatherhood, of queerness—and offers instead a collection that demands the reader's full labor of interpretation. Shibboleth is not interested in being legible to power. It is interested in creating and re-creating a form of being in order to make new ways of living possible.