Wanting in Arabic

One of the first collections of poetry by a transsexual poet writing in English, Wanting in Arabic interrogates queer / Arab/ trans experience and phantasies of identity from Salah's vantage as a mixed writer living in the Lebanese diaspora. Engaging multiple forms/modes of writing (ghazal, Écriture féminine, trans genre, postcolonial, psychoanalytic), Wanting in Arabic asks after the poetic and political relations between writing, desire, the body, nation, and becoming. The second edition, published in 2013 won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.