Composed with bold, economical precision, Khatib's debut comprises a blend of dream, riddle, parable, and prophecy. The book's title is spoken by Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war. This is, incredibly, an apt punctum for the book's meditations on desire, faith, and ancient continuities between the so-called “West” and “(Middle) East”. Khatib's wildly ambitious imagination collapses those divisions and defies contemporary geopolitical premises. The book's idiosyncratic spirituality and vision are matched by its delightful, playful earthiness. Essential reading

DAVE COATES, Poetry Book Society (Summer Bulletin)

I am spellbound by these poems, their heartfelt percussion, their clean slice of precision. Safa Khatib's poems open my eyes, sharpen my ears. Here is a poet I will read in every eternity

SAFIA ELHILLO, author of Girls That Never Die

Khatib's voice is, as you might expect, powerfully polyphonic; brilliant . . . A Dress of Locusts isn't just about language, or myth, or memory, however – it's about how those things press on the body, reconfigure desire, and reshape our faith. All of which gives the book, despite its slim size, a very powerful charge indeed

MAB JONES, Buzz

This slim but powerful collection makes connections that are seldom voiced and collapses eras of world history into each other . . . Khatib breaks open the easy complicity of so much modern discourse

EVE KIMBER, Pulsar

A Dress of Locusts suggests that memory can be ephemeral and speech an effort not quite realized. And yet, for Khatib, these realities are no excuse. Without admonishment, but with a meditative clarity, Khatib calls us to account for the ways we have – and continue to – turn eyes away from the historic now

NIKI HERD, author of The Stuff of Hollywood

Safa Khatib's poems take us everywhere and nowhere. They take us to the river and bring us back thirsty. They are suspended in the in-between – in the pockets of the body, in late visits to the ruins, in the phone calls demanding a life together. Khatib does not shy away from Empire by hiding in the interior, she blurs both topographies into one

MONA KAREEM, author of I Will Not Fold These Maps