"the poetic cosmopolitanism of Arab American poetry necessarily holds a space for the work of national liberation"

Philip Metres begins the third section of the anthology by delving into a community and poetic arena still heavily silenced in America in his eye-opening essay, “Carrying Continents In Our Eyes: Arab American Poetry after 9/11”:

I keep wanting to assert that anti-Arab racism in the United States is not as bad as it used to be; that “sand nigger” is not an epithet “increasingly used,” that internment camps for Arabs are not just around the corner. I keep wanting to assert that while racism and xenophobia exist in the United States, racism against Arabs is no longer the last acceptable prejudice, as Edward Said posed over thirty years ago. After all, just days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush—in what may have been his most courageous statement in office—admonished those who would equate Islam with terrorism. Of course, that didn’t stop scores of hate crime attacks against Arabs and Muslims, as Hayan Charara’s “Going Places”(2011) recounts in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks—the ugly consequences of fear-mongering, Orientalism, and white supremacy.

Of course, racism still exists. Switching on Fox News, listening to Christian talk radio, or cruising the Internet, we don’t need long to notice how anti-Arab and anti-Muslim paranoia seethes in the discourse of the far Right. In a video (August 2012), Republican Tea Party candidate Gabriela Mercer says, “if you know Middle Easterners, a lot of them look Mexican…dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes—and they mix—they mix in. And those people, their only goal in life is to cause harm to the United States. So why do we want them here—either legally or illegally?” In another portion of the video, in front of a border wall that reminds of the wall in Palestine, she says, “and these are radical Muslims who…want to kill us.” Displacing the fear of the Latin American immigrant onto the Middle Eastern immigrant, Mercer notes conspiratorially that prayer rugs were found in the desert borderlands between Mexico and the United States used by smugglers. As if prayer were an ominous precursor to murder.   
To read the full essay and all the rest, order it here.