When the modernist movement in Arabic poetry was launched in the 1940s, it threatened to blur the distinctions between poetry and everything else. The Arabic prose poem is probably the most subversive and extreme manifestation of this blurring, often described as an oxymoron, a non-genre, an anti-genre, a miracle and even a conspiracy. This 'new genre' is here explored as a poetic practice and as a critical lens which gave rise to a profound, contentious and continuing debate about the definition of an Arabic poem, its limits, and its relation to its readers. Huda Fakhreddine examines the history of the prose poem, its claims of autonomy and distance from its socio-political context, and the anxiety and scandal it generated.