Ripe Feathers

Author: Ahmed Zaid

Publisher: No, Dear (2025)

Ahmed Zaid’s chapbook, Ripe Feathers, centers around a first generation Arab-American ill at ease, if not homeless, in his adopted home. These poems are written not from the predictable margins of an old or new world, but from the abrasive and destabilizing sense of being in between and yet beholden to different worlds, different cultures, different languages. Zaid doesn’t adapt himself to the conventions and idioms of American English; rather, and more creatively, he adapts the new language, the new conventions, to render as painstakingly as possible his heartbreaking and inspiring sense of strangeness which, ironically, is precisely what makes these movingly elusive poems so quintessentially American.