This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty: 40 Sonnets

From the “undeniable, unforgettable” (Kaveh Akbar) Zeina Hashem Beck, a profound new collection of mirror sonnets that explore the division and correspondence between selves and alternate realities experienced in exile

In This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, Zeina Hashem Beck once again reinvents the sonnet—this time not as a Shakespearean love poem or a Petrarchan ode, but as a post-colonial vehicle of the immigrant experience. Her chosen form, the mirror sonnet, bends language to resist the concept of a singular reality, of one world; because for many immigrants, there exist multiple realities: the world where they now live, and the world they left behind. Hashem Beck connects these experiences of trial and upheaval with her own move from Lebanon to California, but also with the reinvention of the body in middle age, with motherhood, and with the transformative power of love. She chooses to present forty sonnets because she immigrated to California at age forty, and because of the spiritual and cultural significance of this number. From cinemas to magnolias, from San Francisco to Beirut, this collection calls out a world that doesn’t make space for multiple realities, and yet simultaneously creates a world within itself which makes that existence possible.