Yahia Lababidi (@YahiaLababidi), Egyptian American, is the author of ten books of poetry and prose. His 2018 book, Where Epics Fail: Aphorisms on Art, Morality and Life of the Spirit, was featured on the PBS NewsHour. Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems (1993–2015) debuted at #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases in 2016. His most recent book, a collection of spiritual reflections, is Learning to Pray (2021).
Photo by Yahia Lababidi
There comes a time in one’s life when—to reflect, heal, and grow—one must retreat from the world. Middle age, naturally, is a stage of turning inward, and our global pa...
Painting was called “silent poetry.” – Ralph Waldo EmersonEager to emerge from isolation and encounter art and (safely) others, a writer in Florida takes in Van Gogh Alive at th...
BARBAR, Heartbeat (The Painter and the Thief), 2018, oil on canvas 150 x 220 cm
Only connect! That was her whole sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be e...
The artist is a lawyer who defends any accused person when society plays the role of the judge. I am generally biased for injustice and those stripped of their rights.
―Walid Ebeid
Refle...
Photo by Oscar Sutton / Unsplash
During quarantine, a poet, essayist, and aphorist returns to the aphorism, the “sushi of literature.”
If life has placed you on probation, best to pro...
A promotional still of actor Mads Mikkelsen in the role of Hannibal Lecter from NBC's Hannibal.
Clarice debuts on CBS All Access today, promising a “deep dive into the untold pe...
A still image from the film White Tiger (Netflix, 2021).
After watching White Tiger, a writer contemplates the film alongside revolution in Egypt, Black Lives Matter prot...
Eugene, Oregon. Resource Publications. 2020. 270 pages.
GLANCING AT ITS TABLE of contents and finding subjects ranging from C. S. Lewis to Morrissey to the Arab Spring, it might appea...
London. Unbound. 2018. 256 pages.
Yahia Lababidi has done something at once anachronistic and deeply contemporary with Where Epics Fail, his wide-ranging collection of aphorisms. The book is...
Enrapture Captivating Media / Unsplash
What becomes a legend most? Great talent, suffering, and mystery . . . three ingredients that French poet Arthur Rimbaud possessed in spades. General rea...
Photo: Zakaria WakramTheologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language. – Meister Eckhart
We live in unexemplary times, maddened by fear, murde...
Agostino Arrivabene (b. 1967, Italy), Androgynous, 2016, oil, gold leaf on linen, 50x40cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Religion is at its best when it becomes a countercultural forc...
Geoff Livingston, “America Is a Land of Immigrants,” Dulles International Airport, January 28, 2017
Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal used to say that he drew his worldview from a dry cleaner’s slip he cam...
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Press 53. 2016. 204 pages.
Mystical and modern, Yahia Lababidi’s Balancing Acts, a collection of poems spanning across a career of decades, tethers together a...
Aphorisms were the form that gave me the most relief, that offered the deepest bloodletting. In the aphorism, I didn’t have to say “I,” I could just let the thing speak itself, so I didn’t feel compr...