Poet Yahia Lababidi Finds Balance In The Mundane

Award-winning poet and aphorist Yahia Lababidi first came to the United States ten years ago. Since then, the Egyptian-born Lababidi has carved out a career as author, essayist and public intellectual, and his books have earned him high praise and comparison to Walt Whitman, Rumi, and Wallace Stevens. “His poetry, music, and wisdom pass through him unselfconsciously, purely, like a hallowed breeze,” rhapsodizes Chard deNiord. “He must hurt at the sound of his ecstasies.”

Lababidi’s latest collection, Balancing Acts, displays his wide gifts with language and his deep, almost ancient wisdom as he tackles subjects as varied as the Arab Spring, life in America, how words can deceive, and the quiet, still moments that exist in the most mundane trivialities. He catches his reflection in a cup of coffee and wonders if “some great spoon/had stirred me to the depths/and left everything, swirling,” while the sound of water from a faucet is “weird music from breathing flutes.” He even finds the poetic in a carton of Florida Orange Juice: