What To Count is a lyrical composition of intimate vignettes, revealing the intricacies of intergenerational diasporic relationships across multiple cultures and geographies, from Baghdad to Detroit. This remarkable collection explores the boundaries of form through daring experimentation. Divided into three sections—Pattern, Persistence, and Portrait—each section is a poetic masterpiece in its own right. This significant contribution to Arab and Arab American literature is especially critical, as it marks the twentieth anniversary of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, a war that sparked one of the most prolonged and disheartening periods in the histories of both Iraq and America. Alise Alousi’s poetic journey of un/coverings celebrates the connection between those who survived the direct experiences of war and displacement and those with post-memory in the diaspora—mutually the trauma, hopes, and dreams.
~Dena Al-Adeeb, Iraqi born artist, writer, educator, scholar-activist, and mother
Alise Alousi writes as an Iraqi American, a Detroiter, a daughter, a mother, and a citizen who refuses to let injustices slide, who is sensitive to the darker passages of our history, who counts people who would otherwise be counted out. She is a poet of witness and solace.
~Edward Hirsch
'What counts is the circle when you dance like this,' says Alise Alousi, letting her words echo in our minds. The distinctive voice in these poems allows the 'I' to resort to the other pronouns in reverberating at the most intimate yet public. These are poems at the service of humanity.
~Dunya Mikhail
In What to Count, Alise Alousi trains an unflinching eye on the life she has lived as a daughter of immigrants ('We came to Detroit for a funeral and never left / the all-electric house . . .') and as a mother and wife. But that eye is also inward looking, reliving her own dreams, that gift that, like a poem, 'turned away' as she 'slowly lifted her hand to wave.' However unrequited its gesture, that hand has never stopped waving, and these poems greet their readers with a persistent urgency. What to Count soars high above the fray of postindustrial America.
~Tyrone Williams
I've been reading and listening to Alise Alousi's poetry for a long time, captivated by both its aural and structural patterns and immediacy of experience. This is not poetry at any distance, but one feels inside a life, across the table from the poet, hearing news from a friend. There are an array of formal approaches here, as well as Alousi's commitment to her community and the care she has for it.
~Kazim Ali
As though the ocular cavity may hold an eternity in the 'sliver of the everyday,' Alise Alousi's poems create cinematic dimensions beyond sight as they subtly, gently navigate her father's loss of sight—emblematic of the loss of all the multiplicities that define the speaker. It takes great prowess to shape 'memory / into a spoon,' as Alousi does, nourishing the spirit by revealing and recovering the past.
~Shadab Zeest Hashmi
