Poetry from the Margin: Muhammad ʿAbd al-Bārī Speaks Back, Transforming the Center Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Bārī, the poet of Sudanese origin who has gained a stellar reputation across the Arab World, winning several international poetry prizes over the last decade, has invoked both classical Arabic and world literary heritage, including Greek, Pre-Islamic, Quranic, Andalusian, and sufi themes and elements, only to upend literary expectations built up by such references, to deliver astonishing and transformational contemporary messages, posing challenge and disruption to central Arabic and religious discourses. This paper examines several poems by Muhammad ʿAbd al-Bārī and analyzes his use of literary pastiche, and how the layering and intermixing of such references sprout startling new meanings which infect and morph the trajectory of the poem. For instance, ʿAbd al-Bārī composed a Zarqa’ al-Yamamah poem (“What Zarqa’ al-Yamamah did not say”) which transforms the pre-Islamic myth of Zarqa’ al-Yamamah, and changes the trajectory of the poem and his treatment of the myth significantly. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Bārī is known for his use of sufi and philosophical idiom, images, and metaphors. This and other poems exemplify his use of such themes, in which he inserts a through line of mystical thought into his treatment of Zarqā’ al-Yamāmah, which had never been articulated in her clear-sighted and quasi-prophetic utterances to her people so long ago, thereby reaffirming her as a an unintentional prophet, and transforming her into a mystical forebear. This paper will examine this and three other such poems in detail, analyze ʿAbd al-Bārī’s poetics, situate the poems in the larger body of his body of work to date, and relate his work to the broader currents of transformation from the margin to the center in Modern and Contemporary Arabic Poetry.