Subscribe to our newsletter
Fady Joudah is the author of […], a Finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Exhibit G. His other poetic works include The Earth in the Attic, Alight, Textu, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, and Tethered to Stars. He is the coeditor and cofounder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. More about this author >
From the publisher:
Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, […] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land.
Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”
Fady Joudah’s [...] scribes the elliptical seam between heritage and history into a sustained meditation on war, displacement, and love. Punctuated with the music of maqam in the marrow of its mission, this timeless collection illuminates an existential Palestinian struggle that rises to the universal through Joudah’s deft, querying verse. Marveling at sensualities of apricots and earlobes while tracing plumblines to Gaza’s blood, sand, and stone, he asks: “After the massacre / who will emerge innocent?”
