In a short preface to a number of poems by contemporary Iragi poets, Salih J. Altoma states that the many Iraqi poets in exile “have much to offer in terms of their views about Iraq’s tribulations in recent years.” Confronted with the current human catastrophe in Iraq in addition to the experienced hardship of a life in exile, the Iraqi poet in ghurba (exile) is carrying a double burden, which often puts him in a desperate situation and creates a very particular dilemma for his poetic writing, torn between the political and the aesthetic. One of these writers of exile poetry is the great Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef (b. 1934), who has lived as an exile in more than ten European and Arab countries. Having presented some of Youssef’s recurrent notions of exile in his oeuvre and strategies of writing by means of intertextual reference, the article goes on to look more specifically at the concepts and notions of exile and hybridity in his post-colonial poetry of the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century.‬