Writing
I write to chronicle my experiences, to connect with the world, and to give shape to my thoughts and worldview. Writing is how I make sense of life—its beauty, complexity, and chaos. I write about everything: fleeting moments, deep emotions, passing strangers, distant places. My words are shaped by my roots, family history, travels, and the stories that stirred my imagination as a child. Poetry, stories, essays—each form offers a different lens through which I explore the world and myself. These pieces are fragments of my journey, and I share them here in the hope that they resonate with you.
Recent Works
The Sky Falls on Gaza
The sky is not the sky in Gaza—it is a hand that drops fire,a shadow that swallows the sun. The night is not the night in Gaza—it is sirens and silence,a mother whispering names of the lost. The streets are not streets in Gaza—they are graves waiting to be...
Maps of Blood
They draw and redraw maps with blood,Carving borders where rivers once ran free,Splitting tongues, sundering names,Turning soil sacred with memory to dust. Steel-tipped quills scratch on parchment,While swords etch deeper lines in flesh.They measure land in miles and...
The Return of St. Olaf
On a cold and misty autumn night, as the wind swept across the hills of Northfield, Minnesota, the students of St. Olaf College bustled through their evening routines—some cramming for exams in the library, others laughing in the warmth of Buntrock Commons. Yet, up on...
Books by Omar Bsaies
Legends in My Blood: Family Stories Along the DNA & Caravan Way (2025)
The whole point of [Legends in My Blood] is to harness the power of storytelling—in order to preserve for posterity the familial memories of Tunisian author Omar Bsaies. Thus, there is a personal reason for writing this book. At the same time, however, what is personal becomes universal when individual, personal recollections are transformed into tales that, like all other literature of significance and value, provide insights into the meaning and practice of our shared humanity.
— Ramil Digal Gulle
Monsoon and Arias (2022)
The strength in Bsaies’ poetry lies in its imagery more than its sentiments. One sees this in “The hours measure themselves in years,” where songs are “dressed in blue mantles” and the heart is a falling leaf, a bare murmur. We do not know how long the poet must populate this space where the hours measure themselves in years and where the memory of a kiss roams mercilessly in the poet’s mouth. In this way, absence leaves a staying touch, a mark as infinite in the mind as it is mortal in the skin.
— Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta
Anatomy of Love and Melancholy (2021)
In [Anatomy of Love and Melancholy] Omar Bsaies recreates the world of lovers, a world that is at once paradise and dystopia, a world that could only be configured in the poetry of lovers. In this special world, perfection is riddled with anguish and a thousand and one arrows of unattainable desires. A world of infinite beauty and grace personified in the beloved, but fraught with hysteria and delirium. Both lover and beloved, caught in the crosshairs of desire, with nowhere to escape but into each other andor himself/herself.
— Merlie M. Alunan