Julia Stein
What Were They Like?
Julia Stein, poetry, What Were They Like, 2013
Julia Stein’s poems in What Were They Like? looks at lives― Iraqi lives, Afghan lives and U.S. lives― caught up in the Iraq and Afghan wars. She writes about Iraqi poets and theater artists, Afghan feminists, U.S. soldiers, and a famous Baghdad juice stand. At the end the last poem imagines peace. Stein writes as if Whitman met up with Sumerian myths by way of Hemingway.
A compelling book of poems that dignifies and honors the Iraqi people…. An important book for anyone of human conscience.―Jack Hirschman, author of The Arcanes
Julia Stein’s What Were They Like?, alluding to Denise Levertov’s classic antiwar poem, tracks the poet’s witness to the depredations of the War on Terror. Offering humane portraits of the victims of the 9/11 era, What Were They Like? is an act of global citizenship ….―Phil Metres
Review of Stein's last book of poetry by Susan Suntree
What Were They Like (CC Mirimbo 2013): Reading Julia’s poems moved my heart from the pages of the streets of Baghdad, the bookshops, homes, and juice stalls that once shaped the city’s vibrant, complicated culture. “Iraqi Poets Society” especially moved me where the poets “…found a building by the Tigris. /Iraqi poets now were breathing poems again.” But the inevitable sectarian war within the war leads to “when they began the terrible count:/ ‘One poet was threatened, one was kidnapped.”” and on to “a car bombing blew up Baghdad’s poetry HQ”, leaving the leader of this intended resurrection of cultural life “watching the debris/flying through the air in all directions.”
The poem, “Grape Juice You Can’t Forget” also got hold of me because it rings true, like street songs do. Everyone, looters, Al Queda militants, American soldiers, prime ministers, and people walking by Zbala’s fresh grape juice shop, come for this elixir. Our personal, cultural, and communal need for food brings us all to table. This poem sings about one possible path to a peaceful city life, the path to Zbala’s grape juice shop.
Read this book, walk through the streets of Baghdad, enter the houses and shops, and listen to the people, to intimately meet what we have done.
Book is out of print.