<i>Wanting in Arabic</i> is a refusal of convenient silences,convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictionsof a transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurationsof lyric, ghazal, l?criture feminine, and, in particular,her own sexed voice. Without a memory of herfather? language, the questions her poems ask are thosefor a home known through photographs, for a languagelost with childhood.Braiding theoretical concerns with the ambivalences ofsexed and raced identity, with profound romanticism,<i>Wanting in Arabic</i> attempts to traverse the fantasies offoundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order tofurther a poetics of a conscious partiality of being, ofgenerous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecognition.