Three generations of women: Téta, the grandmother, Fadwa, the mother, and Emné, the daughter who captures the tenderness of her fore-bearers. The poems in this collection recall and restore a family lineage broken by war, death and exile.

This translation of the 2021 Émile-Nelligan Prize-winning collection will attract readers interested in Middle Eastern literatures and those who value poetry written with the urgency of survival, memory, and longing. These short lyric poems weave a narrative that registers one of the primary concerns of the 21st century: migration.

Emné Nasereddine was born in France in 1990 and grew up in Lebanon where she studied French literature at the Saint Joseph University in Beirut. Her poetry explores her experiences of immigration, loss and mourning, the lives of Lebanese women, and the customs and traditions of southern Lebanon. The Dance of the Fig Tree is her first book and was runner-up in the 2021 Émile-Nelligan Prize. She lives in Montreal. Stuart Bell is a translator of French literature. He studied Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge where he was later Translator in Residence (2021). His previous publications include Bird Me (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and Yo-yo Heart which was selected by the Poetry Book Society as their 2022 Winter Translation Choice. He also edited the 2021 collection Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience, the inaugural issue of The South London Cultural Review.