This first study on contemporary Arabic exile poetry focuses on four poets who contributed essentially to the innovation of the contemporary Arabic “Qa“īda”: Sa ͑dī Yūsuf (b. 1934) and Kamāl Sabtī (1955–2006) from Iraq as well as Zakariyyā Muḥammad (b. 1951) and Ghassān Zaqṭān (b. 1954) from Palestine. The comparative work offers a profound interpretation and exhaustive analysis of the main features, topics and motifs relevant to Arabic exile poetry today making use of postcolonial (Homi Bhabha), deconstructivist (Jacques Derrida) and hermeneutic (Paul Ricoeur) theories. Oscillating between the loss of identity and its recovery, between nostalgic and traumatic remembrance both of their past and their homelands, the poets strive to find new poetic and meta-poetic forms and linguistic expressions for a world experienced as being out of joint.