"Wanting in Arabic" is a refusal of convenient silences, convenient stories. Concerned with not covering the tracks of her own metamorphosis, the author dwells in the contradictions of a transsexual poetics, in this attendand disfigurations of lyric, ghazal, l'ecriture feininine, and, in particular, her own sexed voice. Without a memory of her father's language, the questions her poems ask are those for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with childhood. Braiding theoretical concerns with the ambivalences of sexed and raced identity, with profound romanticism, "Wanting in Arabic" attempts to travers the fantasies of foundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order to further a poetics of a consious partiality of being, of generous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecongition.