Lawrence Joseph

Lawrence Joseph , 54, is an olive-skinned Arab-American poet, a child of working-class immigrants who went on to become a professor at St. John’s University School of Law. His poems, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, struggle with the endemic violence in American culture, the dislocation of exile, the lives of common men and women, especially immigrants, and his own battle with God. They are set in bars, small grocery stores, factories and desolate city lots. He deals with all the curses of urban life — racism, murder, poverty, sickness, loneliness, work and suffering. Yet at his core he believes that evil is only finally challenged, if not vanquished, by love.

„I want to capture the mysterious circumstances of being alive today in America,“ he said. / New York Times *) 3.4.02