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Published by Central Avenue Poetry
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
The Pomegranate is a Grenade is a debut poetry collection that examines what it means to grow up Arab and Muslim in the United States, where home is both inherited and continually reshaped. Maha Hashwi draws from the textures of an immigrant household—food shared across generations, religious traditions carried forward, the weight of displacement, and the small, steady acts of love that hold a family together.
Hashwi’s poems move between personal narrative and cultural memory, exploring how identity changes with time, migration, and the stories passed down through parents and community. She writes of resistance, tenderness, and the contradictions of belonging to more than one place, offering readers a vivid look at the emotional landscape of the diaspora.
Honest, accessible, and rooted in lived experience, this collection invites readers into the rooms, rituals, and relationships that shape a life between countries—and asks what we carry, and what carries us, when we call more than one place home.
Excerpt
If the Lebanese Civil War Did Not Force My Family to Flee
If the bombs did not fall,
my mom would not duck at the memory
of fear thirty years later, when a harmless
helicopter flies overhead in a far away land.
If the loud noise wasn't silencing,
maybe my mother would still have a voice.
My parents would still be in Lebanon, having never met,
my mother continuing her art career in Beirut,
not very far from where my father could’ve stayed in his family's house, instead of leaving them behind in exchange for a college education in Ohio,
for money to be sent back, for hope to be held onto.
And maybe I would not have been born and maybe
I would've been okay with that,
if given the chance for my parents
to not have to evacuate, to never go back to their home,
to learn my home through them, the arab-and-american-ness
of growing up as half and half but never complete.
My Arabic wouldn’t be broken, it would be whole.
We would not be finding similarities in California’s climate,
the mountains silhouettes similar, the salty ocean air smelling identical,
the cedar trees just like our flag.
I wouldn’t have to explain to people where my parents are from because they’d know.
I would know, too.
If the war did not conquer,
if my parents survived,
if they lived in Beirut for the last thirty years,
separately or together, would the explosion of 2020
have taken their lives? pushed them out? of a place they were never meant to be?
If the bombs did not fall,
my mom would not duck at the memory
of fear thirty years later, when a harmless
helicopter flies overhead in a far away land.
If the loud noise wasn't silencing,
maybe my mother would still have a voice.
My parents would still be in Lebanon, having never met,
my mother continuing her art career in Beirut,
not very far from where my father could’ve stayed in his family's house, instead of leaving them behind in exchange for a college education in Ohio,
for money to be sent back, for hope to be held onto.
And maybe I would not have been born and maybe
I would've been okay with that,
if given the chance for my parents
to not have to evacuate, to never go back to their home,
to learn my home through them, the arab-and-american-ness
of growing up as half and half but never complete.
My Arabic wouldn’t be broken, it would be whole.
We would not be finding similarities in California’s climate,
the mountains silhouettes similar, the salty ocean air smelling identical,
the cedar trees just like our flag.
I wouldn’t have to explain to people where my parents are from because they’d know.
I would know, too.
If the war did not conquer,
if my parents survived,
if they lived in Beirut for the last thirty years,
separately or together, would the explosion of 2020
have taken their lives? pushed them out? of a place they were never meant to be?
About The Author
Maha Hashwi is a writer and spoken word poet whose work explores the complexities of growing up Lebanese American in Dearborn, Michigan. Unapologetic in her identity as a Muslim and Arab woman, she writes at the intersection of culture, faith, family, and belonging. She leads a community writing workshop, Anyone Can Write, encouraging people of all backgrounds to put their stories on the page. Maha has participated in the Aspen Institute’s Summer Words Writers Conference in Poetry and the Tin House Winter Workshop. She now lives in New York City.
Product Details
- Publisher: Central Avenue Poetry (October 22, 2026)
- Length: 104 pages
- ISBN13: 9781771684705
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Raves and Reviews
"These poems are so richly and beautifully populated, with vibrant image, with the musicality of language, but also with people, the living and the dead, the ancestors and present guiding lights. Within this book, there is not a single universe, there are several, each of them honored by the precision and heart that is present in the craft. What a gift." — Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year
“In The Pomegranate Is a Grenade, Maha Hashwi writes with tenderness, wit and devastating clarity about what it means to come of age between worlds: the mosque and the internet, family and selfhood, homeland and city, love and grief, memory and survival. These poems move from childhood rituals to dating apps, from the intimacy of a hijab borrowed from a mother to the horror of a body made into shrapnel. Hashwi’s language is playful, searching and sharp, alive to the absurdities of modern life and the sacredness of what we carry. This collection understands that every ordinary object—a fig, a hard drive, a coffee shop, a pomegranate—can hold a universe, and that even sweetness can become explosive in a world built to break what it cannot contain.” — Noor Hindi, author of Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow
“Maha Hashwi’s The Pomegranate Is a Grenade is a collection of startling emotional candor and fierce political clarity. These poems understand displacement not as a single event but as a lifelong condition: linguistic, geographic, romantic, spiritual. My Arabic wouldn’t be broken, it would be whole, Hashwi writes, in a line that distills the ache of diaspora with devastating precision, while elsewhere insisting, love isn’t just a phrase. Her poems move fluidly between family kitchens, prayer, heartbreak, headlines, refusing to separate the personal from the political; grief for the self and grief for the world exist in the same bloodstream. This is a debut of tremendous heart and conviction, from a voice unafraid to be both vulnerable and unsparing.” — Hala Alyan, author of I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, 2026 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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