Squares and Courtyards moves with the rhythm of the writer's life, from Paris to New York between the poles of youth and age sickness and health life and death. Sequences celebrate the community of friends the courage or those living with HIV and cancer. This book is at once elegiac and a song of praise to language's power to remind us that, to take action, it is necessary to rake notice.

"Deseperanto refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word "esperanto," signifying "hope," and the French "desespoir," meaning "to lose heart." Desesperanto, then, is a universal language of despair--despair of the possibility of a universal language"--Dustjacket.

"In the city of Beirut, five shabby dwellings circle a courtyard with a pomegranate tree weeping blood red fruit. The residents hear screams in the night as a boy is beaten by his father - a punishment for masturbating in his sleep. A crime not worthy of the punishment: the neighbors gossip and decide that he must have tried to rape his sisters. The poems he writes are perhaps an even greater crime to his father, but ultimately a gift to his eldest...