FADY JOUDAH is a poet, translator, and practicing physician of internal medicine. His first poetry collection, The Earth in the Attic, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007.
KHALED MATTAWA is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Michigan. He has authored four books of poetry.
"This collection of new translations of Jordanian Amjad Nasser's poetry serves not only as a survey of his impressive body of work, but draws together poems that demonstrate Nasser's invaluable contribution to the global poetic aesthetic of the late twentieth century and beyond. Rich in images and ideas that emerge from the specific but speak to the universal, A Map of Signs and Scents is the perfect volume to experience Nasser's poetry for the first time." --World Literature Today
"The sensibility of the Near East is in every line, the flavor and longing, the memories are like no other; yet he's compared favorably to Celan, Cavafy, Borges, Neruda, in classic structure and sensuality. Nasser's best gift is the ability to fold the ancient within the troubled 'present' with philosophical discourse and pungent imagery. Personal love, and love for this world, with all its sorrows, in lyric and poetic prose, show this man as a Master of the word in any language." --Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books