Suzanne P. Stetkevych is Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professor of Arabic & Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, Executive Editor of the book series Brill Studies in Middle East Literatures and co-winner of the Shaikh Zayed Book Award for Cultural Personality of the Year 2019. She received her Ph.D. in 1981 in Classical Arabic Literature from the University of Chicago. She has published in the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Journal of Semitic Studies and others.

This study deals with the most radical of the badīʿ ("novel") poets of the ʿAbbāsid period, Abū Tammām. After a critique of classical badīʿ theory it proposes a redefinition of the new poetry as an exegetical metapoesis and on that basis provides analyses, accompanied by original translations, of five of Abū Tammām's most celebrated political odes and of extensive selections from his renowned anthology, the Ḥamāsah.