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Artist Self-Portrait
While war, injustice, and spiritual fatigue continue to poison the air, Yahia Lababidi finds a beauty-infused resistance in the surreal work of Polish photographer…
Yahia Lababidi
July 22, 2025
Burlington, Vermont. Fomite Press. 2023. 168 pages. In these days of seconds-long sound bites and granular social media posts, the impression one gets reading through Yahia Lab…
December 18, 2023Maryam Lamei, Birds Are Gathered in God (2021) / Courtesy of the artist / www.maryamlamei.com Searching for solace following the events of October 7, Yahia Lababidi discovered Irania…
December 13, 2022A writer’s time attending the theatrical trial that became the docuseries The Vow leads him to reflect more generally on the culture-wide moral relativism and abuse of language that all…
March 23, 2022Photo 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 p…
Painting was called “silent poetry.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson Eager to emerge from isolation and encounter art and (safely) others, a writer in Florida takes in Van G…
September 21, 2021BARBAR, 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…
March 22, 2021The 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 Refl…
February 24, 2021Photo 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 p…
February 10, 2021A 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 i…
January 27, 2021A still image from the film White Tiger (Netflix, 2021). After watching White Tiger, a writer contemplates the film alongside revolution in Egypt, Black Lives…
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…
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 b…
January 10, 2019Enrapture Captivating Media / Unsplash What becomes a legend most? Great talent, suffering, and mystery . . . three ingredients that French poet Arthur Rimbaud possessed in spades.…
May 16, 2018Photo: Zakaria WakramTheologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language. – Meister EckhartWe live in unexemplary times, maddened by fear, murderou…
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 force;…
February 6, 2017Geoff Livingston, “America Is a Land of Immigrants,” Dulles International Airport, January 28, 2017Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal used to say that he drew his worldview from a dry cleaner’s slip he came…
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 togethe…
January 21, 2015Certain cherished books are like old loves. We didn’t part on bad terms; but it’s complicated, and would require too much effor…
July 25, 2012Aphorisms 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 compro…
