“The poems are routes one might take to reach home in your own body, mind, history, and landscape. They vibrate with longing and tenderness.” –Kerry Clare, 49th Shelf

“Employing a number of different poetic modes, Salah’s writing is by turns political, evocative, and quite often hot. A Lebanese-Canadian from Nova Scotia who never saw her father’s homeland nor spoke his tongue, Salah explores the nuances of identity, and her writing is simply gorgeous.” —The Walrus

“[Wanting in Arabic] shares a cultural experience rarely made available to mainstream American audiences.” —Buzzfeed

“Wanting in Arabic is a self-impelled keening for identification with a lost tongue, both that of her father’s Lebanese roots and her own metamorphosis … cross-citing psychoanalytic and feminist wagers about the sexed text … with glam-porno rubber-assed apostrophes to various lovers (not a poetics of celibacy, I assure you), with the funny and poignant savvy of postcolonial theory…. This indeterminate and determined voice chronicles the trans-self’s journey as a tour et retour de force…. With ethical toughness and carnal ecstasy, Salah’s writing bosoms up every damn dam in the literary waterway.” –Margaret Christakos, The Globe and Mail

“This is a beautiful and disturbing collection of poems, writing from the uncharted langscape of the third sex. Images of the rose, of the beloved, can they be made new? Yes indeed, Wanting in Arabic does just that.” –Mary Di Michele, author of Debriefing the Rose

“Trish Salah’s poetic sequence is not simply a narrative of gender change; it’s a wandering, thoughtful text, one both fierce and tremulous.” –Erin Mouré, author of Furious and Domestic Fuel