To what extent is “Arab American” a title that can be defined concisely rather than atmospherically? Does it carry any weight if it is externally and involuntarily imposed, rather than adopted willingly? Is it something to be championed and celebrated, or is it to be buried, obscured, and avoided?

The 39 poets, whose work is collected in Hayan Charara’s “Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry,” all bear some relation to the term “Arab American,” though each also resists such a title insofar as it is limiting. If “Inclined” can be said to expose one unifying theme that binds Arab American poets together, it is their resistance to be stereotyped as Arab Americans on the one hand, yet their insistence on Arab and American components to their identity and experiences.

“My hesitation to define ‘Arab American’ is a hesitation to give it a ‘once and for all’ type of definition. This term means different things to different people,” said Charara in an email. “‘Arab American,’ for me, is one of many identifications. I’m sure this is how many others see themselves—as Arab Americans, but also as Lebanese, or Palestinian, or men, women, husbands, wives, engineers, Detroiters, New Yorkers, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and so on.”

One thing “Arab American” means to many outsiders is an improvisation on the character assault of all things Arab, as Charara explains in the book’s introduction. “Whether in literature, art, television, film, scholarship, or journalism, Arabs and Arab culture are depicted mostly as violent, intolerant, backward, and misogynistic,” he writes. “Indeed, it should not come as a surprise that analysis nearly 30 years old still holds true, for today even highly educated persons draw conclusions about things ‘Arab’ that are nearly indistinguishable from remarks made several hundred years ago.”

One poet told Charara of Arab American poets, “It’s not as if we’re listed in the Yellow Pages,” and indeed the poets in “Inclined” are anything but carbon copies of their 19th century Arab ancestors.

“Growing Up with a Sears Catalog in Benghazi, Libya” by Khaled Mattawa is one good example of this evolution. Mattawa, assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, imagines a utopia inhabited by the people and things he sees in the catalog, from “a pink man riding a red lawn mower” with “Eyes half-shut, cigarette clouds above him, he snored, leaving unfinished a recitation of truncated schemes” to “women in transparent bras.” In fact, Mattawa “fancied camping with the blue-eyed one in the $42 Coleman tent, the two of us fishing at a lake without mosquitoes, sailing the boat on page 613.” Like many fantasies of young men, the fishing trip is not entirely clean, and Mattawa imagines himself and the model galloping in “lime green scooters” to “our 4-bedroom home, mud up to our knees, to make love on the mattress on page 1219.”

Charara’s “Thinking American” is also quite complicated. Charara, who was born in Detroit, describes his hometown as a place “where boys are manufactured into men, where you learn to think in American” and where “Everyone is suspect: baldheaded carriers from the post office; old Polish ladies who swear to Jesus, Joseph, and Mary; your brother, especially your brother; waiting in a long line for work.” If the reader still cannot decipher whether Charara is a fan of Detroit, he clarifies. “Make no mistake, it’s miserable. After all, you bought a one-way Greyhound ticket, cursed each and every pothole on the road out … You never go back. Things could be worse. Maybe Detroit is a shithole, it’s where you were pulled from the womb into the streets.” But then it emerges that Detroit is not really referring to the city at all. “Listen, when I say Detroit, I mean any place,” Charara concludes. “By thinking American, I mean made.”

A Libyan boy fantasizing about a blue-eyed American model in a Sears catalog and another boy, who seems far more American than Arab American, cursing his home town are surely different sorts of Arab poetry than Rumi wrote about in his sacred poems, and arguably a far more problematic (and almost self-imposed Orientalist) notion of Arab poetry. Indeed, Mattawa’s poem is quite different from Mohja Kahf’s “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears,” (also in the anthology), in which the grandmother elicits stares and worse from “respectable” customers, when she places her feet in the sink “with great poise, balancing herself with one plump matronly arm against the automated hot-air hand dryer, after having removed her support knee-highs and laid them aside, folded in thirds.” (Ed. note: The grandmother was preparing to pray.)

It is no wonder that Mattawa and his peers are having trouble finding audiences. A Google search for “Arab American poetry” at the time of composing this article returns a mere 4,800 hits and change, and one major eight-year-old anthology, “Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry.” edited by Gregory Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa.

Charara feels poetry in general is widely ignored. He recently attended a reading in Houston by Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Hass, whom he calls “probably one of the most famous living American poets, if not one of the most famous American poets of the past 50 years,” and only about 100 people attended in a city?”which boasts a very large and vibrant literary community … Compare that to the millions and millions who know the names of every baby some Hollywood actor has adopted, or some other phenomenon,” he said.

“Inclined” must be applauded for combating this ignorance of Arab American poetry. A field so vast that it can contain both a young boy longing for Sears models and a grandmother washing her feet in a Sears sink, a grandmother “who knows one culture—the right one,” even as the antagonistic shoppers have their own cultural perspective wherein she “might as well have been squatting in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor. Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn’t matter which,” is surely worth careful examination for what it simultaneously says about art and about Arab American culture and identity.

A Washington, D.C.-based writer, Menachem Wecker blogs on religion and art at //Iconia.canonist.com.