When it comes to the challenges of the actual process, I soldier on as best I can, on my own.

The real question should be: what makes a good political poem? The possible answers to that question are both obvious and yet still a little too subjective for anyone to ever fully agree on. What do I most wish to see in a political poet? Sublimated rebellion.

That boom town [Abu Dhabi] proved to be the reef against which my family crashed, the story of many who seek the promised land, and my poetry is a versification of that personal history. History is all I have.

Whenever poetry and politics are mentioned in the same breath, we tend to miss the point entirely - as I often have - and we ask ourselves whether poetry and politics even belong together, because they're often so poorly married that we think of them as oil and water.

When it comes to the challenges of the actual process, I soldier on as best I can, on my own.

One cannot simply decide to write apolitical poetry, in the way one decides to drink lemonade instead of tea, it's far more subliminal than that.

Everyone wants to be open and inclusive, but nobody wants to pay for it. It's the biggest roadblock to translating living writers, especially poets.