In Stone Bird, Poems of Exile, David Anthony Sam imagines a contemporary Syrian exiled from the civil war but also from all he has known, finding a safer place but not a welcoming one in the United States. Behind the collection lies the diaspora from the Syrian Civil War and the Arab emigration of the last 150 years, including the ghost of Sam's Syrian grandfather who immigrated to America a century ago and did not find the streets paved with gold. Finally, these poems speak to the more universal experience of "exile" as part of the human condition.