This struggle – for language, and for ways to resist racism and cultural engulfment – is also, differently, Saleh’s struggle.

The Flirtation of Girls is a wonderful, poetically sumptuous book. It evokes the frustrations, the pleasures and the power of cultural witnessing experienced by an astute and witty poetic mind-shaping experience, in ghazals, aubades, elegies, odes, tributes, memorialising, meditations, prayers, palindromes.

It sounds exhausting, this poetic discipline, and in some ways it is, as it embraces multiple poetic forms, honouring the intellectual mentors (Darwish, Nizzar Qabbani, Mohja Kahf) of Arabic poetry. But what Saleh also produces is vibrant, candid and fresh understandings for the narrator and the reader. Her poetry opens eyes and ears, giving narrative shape to what is traditional, but also endangered, piercingly haunting.

Positioned painfully between cultural homes, and ragged, shifting values and beliefs, Saleh, whose first novel was published last year, meditates, poetically and ideologically, on what she expects of herself in Australia: “To be an Arab-Muslim woman settler living on stolen land is to try to reassemble fragments, to find meaning in them, to strive for a semblance of ‘justice’ and search for little joys and small loves in the disjoints of Diaspora.”

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The narrator longs for “past glories”, the hope that “... our beloved Lebanon will rise again”; but undergirding this longing is an alternative knowledge that “country is a broken headstone”.

As poet (translator between worlds), Saleh is constantly experiencing the ways in which languages refuse, fail, imprison, release, negotiate diasporic life. “Does a comma slow the chaos, or expand it?” (Punctuation as Organized Violence). As readers, we are privileged to follow the raw, ecstatic, abject wanderings of this diasporic girl, as “They came to your beloved Beirut and forced all the wrong/ languages into your mouth./ you separated yourself into two piles of neither here nor there” (Here, There: a Ghazal). But one immense and moving realisation of this poetry is that “the poets have ways of teaching us that we are much bigger than here and there”.

This review has not even begun to ask: how does Jeanine Leane’s “always was, always will be” speak with Sara Saleh’s “we are much bigger than here and there”. That conversation is our future.

Lyn McCredden is a professor of Australian literature and literary studies at Deakin University.