Vénus Khoury-Ghata was born in Bcharré, a Christian village in northern Lebanon. Raised in Beirut, she was not the child of the intelligentsia like many literary émigrés, but one of four children of a bilingual policeman and a practical-nurse-turnedhousewife. She has lived in France since 1972.

Although her mother tongue (and her mother's tongue) is Arabic, Khoury-Ghata has become a major figure in Francophone writing, the literature of writers from the Maghreb, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Canada, the West Indies, who, as the Algerian playwright and poet Kateb Yacine memorably stated, “write in French to tell the French that I am not French”. They bring to the French of France a poetry rich in narrative, fantasy, satire and engagement.

A prolific writer of fiction as well as poetry, Vénus Khoury- Ghata has published twenty novels and eighteen collections of poems. After settling in France, she chose French as her language of expression. She herself translates contemporary Arabic poetry, especially that of the Syro-Lebanese poet Adonis. The Arabic language seems to speak through her French, in her elaborate, pithy figurative language, in the word-play possible in a language where one “root” gives rise to myriad words, in the landscapes and seasons through which her poems’ protagonists (hers are poems with protagonists) move.

The first sequence of the present book is exphrastic, in the voice of a Cycladic statue “the lady of Syros,” yet “her” story merges with some obsessive themes of Khoury-Ghata's poetry and fiction: the death of a brother closer than a twin; an enforced silence at once erotic and oppressive, and a female protagonist's reclamation of her own narrative.

The rest of the book is from the author's most recent collection, Le Livre des suppliques, published in 2015, written after the death of the poet's life partner, a decorated hero of the Resistance decades earlier, stepfather to the poet's youngest daughter—Yasmine Ghata, now herself a novelist—after her husband's death. But the addressee of the wry elegies in “The Book of Petitions” has little to do with the actual man mourned. As in a much earlier poem, “The Dead Man's Monologue,” death becomes a kind of departure into exile, expatriation to a country with captious laws, a bad postal service, a close, uneasy relation to the world of animals and plants.