Sidekick - by Naomi Shihab Nye (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Written by internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye, Sidekick stands as a testament to poetry's enduring power to bear witness. With each poem, Nye affirms a truth that feels more urgent than ever: every human being deserves safety, dignity, and peace.

Drawing on her family's deep roots in Palestine, Nye writes with both abiding love and immeasurable heartbreak, offering intimate reflections that illuminate the human cost of conflict. Long a champion of dialogue across borders and divides, she crafts poems that are direct, conversational, and unafraid to confront the systems and structures that perpetuate harm.

Through her signature blend of candor, lyrical grace, and careful attention to everyday lives, Nye offers a collection that urges readers to look more closely, feel more deeply, and imagine a world in which we refuse to turn away from one another.

Review Quotes

"This book is more than a book of poems. It is a call for awakening." --Lone Star Literary Life

"On every page, Shihab Nye's insistent call is the same: people, all people, deserve to live safe and healthy lives, free from fear and violence. She mourns, rages, takes politicians to task, but always lands on the side of compassion." --Shelf Awareness

"This poet, always America's sweetheart, has shared her life with us through her career, warmth, and wisdom -- earning our validation -- and now, even more, she makes emotion and the world meld, to give an in-depth analysis of her besieged land, letting us know how it appears from inside. In connecting the land and the sea, possibilities and tragedies, poetry reaches the high bar." --Washington Independent Review of Books

About the Author

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty volumes including five collections of poetry from Boa Editions: Red Suitcase (1994), Fuel (1998), You & Yours (2005), Transfer (2011), and The Tiny Journalist (2019). She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow. Nye has received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Texas Writer Award 2024, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Texas Institute of Letters, the Arab American National Museum, and the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in San Antonio, TX.