Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781726105
Publication date: February 22, 2021
Price: £10.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781726112
Publication date: February 22, 2021
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
“A moving and humane collection… The poems remind us poignantly of the importance of hope and love in bleak times and pay tribute to inspiring acts of courage.” – Mslexia
“Inhale/Exile is a confident, humane and thought-provoking debut.” – The Poetry Review
Inhale/Exile is the debut poetry collection by Abeer Ameer. Inspired by the many stories she heard as a child and visiting family in Iraq as an adult, Abeer has written a book that celebrates the resilience of her forebears and extended family in Baghdad and around the world. The book presents a range of characters in a mixture of political and personal poems; ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances. Formally diverse, using both traditional and experimental methods, these poems are also full of empathy and suffused with a quietly persistent faith.
“This remarkable debut offers us a treasure-chest of 50 stories that lift the wraps from the personal and the public, the domestic and the political, revealing a hoard of complex tales, deftly, powerfully told. Abeer Ameer’s poems weave a series of mesmerising journeys back and forth between Iraq and the UK, exploring the interstices and convergences between cultures, between atrocity and hope, faith and dogma, language, silence and love. Ameer tells it bluntly, sometimes wryly, but with surgical precision and composure: each poem vibrant with the smells, tastes, textures, muscles and heartbeat of authentic experience, ‘in the search for home between two rivers’.” – Robert Walton
“This debut collection by Abeer Ameer is a moving, impassioned exploration of human resilience in the face of political upheaval, state persecution, the violence of war and the pain of exile. Intimate and personal, rooted in history that is at once ancient and contemporary, individual and international, these poems remind us that even in the darkest times, there is light, and there is love. Inhale/Exile insists that the reader doesn’t turn away from suffering, like the photographer who must ‘share what the world needs to see’, and in return we learn the stories of lives lost and lives saved, witness tremendous acts of courage, and understand how faith ensures survival.” – Katherine Stansfield
Abeer Ameer
Abeer Ameer is a poet of Iraqi heritage living in Cardiff. She originally trained as a dentist in London and completed her Membership of the Royal College of Dental Surgeons in Edinburgh. She has an MSc in Conscious Sedation in Dentistry from Cardiff University, developing an interest in treatment of anxious patients and patients with special needs. Her MSc dissertation investigated the potential use of mindfulness-based therapies in the management of dental anxiety.
Her poems have appeared widely online and in print journals including The Rialto, Magma, The Poetry Review, Modron, Poetry London and Poetry Wales. Her debut poetry collection, Inhale/Exile (Seren 2021), was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2022. Her poem at least is shortlisted in the Forward Poetry Prize 2025 for Best Single Poem. She was recently commissioned by Remembering Srebrenica Wales to write a poem for the thirtieth year commemorating the genocide and has provided writing workshops for students in university and as part of a delegation trip to Bosnia in 2025. She is currently working on her second poetry collection and regularly shares readings of poems on her YouTube channel.
“[a] startlingly successful debut.”
Chris Edgoose, Wood Bee Poet
“The pun in the title of Abeer Ameer’s Inhale/Exile is key to the entire book; exile and displacement are the air these poems breathe.”
Billy Mills, Elliptical Movements
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Despite the subject matter, Ameer writes at times with a wry sense of humour. But the overwhelming sense that comes across is her honesty and compassion. Like a war correspondent, she reports the facts as she finds them, does not point the finger of blame at anyone in particular, but reaches to the heart of the matter which is always the “search for home between two rivers”. Ameer’s poems are powerful. They punch our conscience hard … This is a very fine debut collection. Highly recommended.”
Neil Leadbeater, Write Out Loud
“An astonishing odyssey across familiar and unfamiliar terrain, in search of a unified language of understanding … a dialectic of oppositions is, in any case, one way of capturing the essence of this bravely realised collection: conflict and resolution, the dispassionate mechanics of guerilla warfare, the fragrant, often colourful landscapes in which terror unfolds … [an] astonishing and deeply affecting collection.”
Steve Whitaker, Yorkshire Times
“As one might expect, there is a lot of danger, violence, persecution, even death, in these pages. Yet for all the grim moments, they are not grim reading, because the focus is on resistance, survival and human decency in the face of adversity … Abeer Ameer is a dentist by profession, which as far as I know is unusual for a poet – doctor-poets there are in plenty, but dentist-poets are far rarer. At their best, poets from the medical world have both a lot of empathy and a hard edge, an ability to distance, that stops them getting soppy and keeps their vision clear — one thinks of the late Dannie Abse. This certainly seems to be true of this poet.”
Sheenagh Pugh, Live Journal
“With empathy and insight, Cardiff poet Abeer Ameer [pictured, top] ‘head hops’ – and, also, heart hops – between a disparate, diverse range of characters who are, for the main part, united by experiences of political threat, unrest, upheaval, and exile. Intimacy and atrocity go hand-in-hand in these poems, the reader of which frequently witnesses the aftermath of terrible events – but also many tender moments … This is a book of terrible revelations, but also of hope and of wonder. An old woman, in the final lines of the book’s final poem, may be blind, but still “her inner eye beholds celebration”. These poems urge us to do the same.”
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
“A collection that’s angry without being cynical, hopeful without being sentimental, and gives us a wholly fresh perspective.”
Thomas Tyrrell, Wales Arts Review
