In the translator's preface, Marilyn Hacker observes that 'Khoury-Ghata's work bridges the anti-lyrical surrealist tradition which has informed modern French poetry since Baudelaire, and the parabolic and communal narrative with its (we might say Homeric) repetitions of metaphors and semi-mythic tropes of Arabic poetry.' Alphabets Of Sand judiciously collects poems by Khoury-Ghata (and translations by Marlilyn Hacker) that have appeared elsewhere: 'Widow,' 'The Seven Honeysuckle Sprigs of Wisdom,' and 'Early Childhood' from Here There Was Once a Country (2001); and 'Words,' 'The Darkened Ones,' and 'The Cherry Tree's Journey' from She Says (2003) and Nettles (2008).  The title of the present collection aptly evokes the grain of the poet's voice throughout, that 'erotic mixture of timbre and language,' in Roland Barthes's phrase.
    Fittingly, 'the first written alphabet is said to have originated with the Phoenicians, ancestors of the Lebanese,' but the poet's alphabet is more wide-ranging.  For Khoury-Ghata, words
'broke up into alphabets / ate a different earth on each continent.'  Some alphabets were read from right to left, others from left to right; some alphabets did not survive.  In a poem dedicated to her sister May Menassa, Khoury-Ghata tells us that as young girls they had 'vanquished the alphabet' when they wrote the word 'goat' in both directions.  The poems in Alphabets of Sand return words to their source, to what Barthes called 'the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels.'  In answer to her own question - 'Where do words come from?' - Venus Khoury-Ghata gives us a universe in which difference is made visible, where loss becomes a memory, and the familiar changed into the marvelous.