Poems of Alexandria and New York

Ahmed Morsi is a renowned painter as well as a prolific art critic, journalist, translator, and, as this book reveals to a new audience, a consummate poet.
Poems of Alexandria and New York, Ahmed Morsi’s first volume in English translation, captures the modernity and empathy at the heart of all his works, his surrealistic humor, and his visions of the dramas of ordinary life.

It comprises two of his best known collections, Pictures from the New York Album and Elegies to the Mediterranean, both written when he resumed writing poetry following a break of nearly 30 years after the calamitous Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War. The former opens up the city of New York, his home since the mid-1970s and where he still lives and works, while the latter takes readers deep into abiding memories of the Mediterranean city of his birth, Alexandria, Egypt, in 1930.

Ahmed Morsi was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1930 and grew up there. After graduating in English Literature, he published his first poetry collection and studied art in the Alexandria studio of Silvio Becchi. From early on, he became a part of Alexandria’s literary and artistic society. Later, living in Baghdad from 1955 to 1957 when it was a literary, artistic and intellectual hub, he nurtured his art criticism, working with Iraq’s modernist writers and painters, before returning to Egypt. In Cairo, Morsi co-founded and was editor-in-chief of the avant-garde literary magazine Galerie '68. He lives in New York City.

Raphael Cohen is a professional translator and lexicographer who studied Arabic and Hebrew at Oxford University and the University of Chicago. He has translated, for Banipal magazine, a growing number of works by contemporary Arab poets, including Ahmed Rashid Thani, Hala Mohammad, Samer Abu Hawwash, Ahmed Al-Mulla and Marwan Makhoul. His fiction in translation includes novels by authors George Yarak, Ahlem Mosteghanemi, Mohamed Salmawy and Mona Prince. His translation of Omani author Ghalya F T Al Said’s novel The Madness of Despair is also published by Banipal Books, 2021.