The Flirtation of Girls / Ghazal el-Banat

A stunning collection from Sydney poet, human rights activist, community organiser, and refugee campaigner Sara M Saleh.With her first full-length poetry collection, Sara M Saleh introduces us to the polychromatic lives of girls and women as they come into being amidst war, colonial and patriarchal violence, and exile and migration. This searing work interrogates and represents the complexity of Arab-Australian Muslim women's identities as they negotiate an irresistible world full of music and family, grit and grief, love and loss.Saleh's poetry is not only an inherently political act, but a deeply personal one, charged with multilayered conversations and meditations amongst three generations of women in Sara's family. Her poems dazzle with an incantatory force of spirit, survival and selfhood, proving without a doubt that Saleh is one of this country's most compelling, contemporary poets.

'Sara Saleh brings the politics of occupied homelands into sharp, unapologetic focus through beautifully crafted nonfiction poetry that explores the intricacies of food, family life and relationships, alongside the mechanisms of othering, rejection and racism ... Saleh reminds us: there is never a good time to lose a country. And there isn't. Nor will there be. But as her poignant, frank, moving collection shows us: only our poets have ways of teaching us we are bigger than here or there.' - Jeanine Leane

'These poems vibrate with aliveness, with history, with the legacy of interrupted (and reclaimed) narratives.' - Hala Alyan

'A collection you will feel in your throat. The Flirtation of Girls announces Sara Saleh's exquisite and defiant voice. She is a poet who knows herself and her world, stares oppression in its many faces, and envisages worlds both despite and without it. Her poems make the violent ordinary extraordinary - and bring the things that loom large and unspeakable into the same palm of your hand that holds the book.' - Alison Whittaker

Sara M Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer, and the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian migrants. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published widely and she is co-editor of the ground-breaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other- Stories on Race and Identity. Her first novel is Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm Press, 2023), which was shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier's Awards. Her first poetry collection is The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat (UQP, 2023), and it was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award and longlisted for the ALS Gold Medal in 2024.Sara is the first and only poet to win both the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the inaugural Affirm fellowship for Sweatshop writers, a Neilma Sidney travel grant, Varuna writers residency, and Amant writers residency in Brooklyn, New York, amongst other honours.Sara is based on Bidjigal land with her partner and their beloved three cats and pup.

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