ABSTRACT

Title of Document:

WAKING UP IN BEIRUT

Zein El-Amine, MFA, 2010

Directed By:

Professor Michael Collier,

Department of English

The poems in Waking Up in Beirut are mainly obsessed with an exile‟s search for home. The first section is a sequence of poems that starts as an elegy for a friend and expands into an elegy for Washington DC. The second section charts a return to the poet‟s geographical home, and deals more directly with the poet‟s ethnic identity. This section delivers more elegies in the form of narrative, mostly dealing with three women who were central to the poet‟s life. In the third section the poet attempts to break out of the narrative into the lyrical. This last section defines the poet‟s evolution through his apprenticeship and represents an embarkation point for future works.