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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 writes from the split perspective of a Palestinian American physician caring for the sick while watching the destruction of Gaza from the United States, a nation complicit in that destruction. He locates the paradox of his position everywhere: in the seed a sparrow eats from his proffered hand; in his writing in English, the oppressor’s language; in the faces of Palestinian children receiving meals from aid kitchens—a glimpse into what his life could have been, and what is being lost in a war disproportionately impacting children and their families. Throughout the book, beauty insists on its survival not only through the Palestinian people, but also through the nonhuman world in which he takes occasional refuge from the devastation that humanity brings upon itself.
By placing before readers a series of carefully chosen images from Gaza, Joudah presses his reader to comprehend that the experience of both the individual and the whole are integral to an explicitly Palestinian understanding of genocide, even if that rendering is a nearly impossible endeavor. Exhibit G insists on the immensity of Palestinian interiority, and finds in this collective act of creation a hyperpresent awareness. “By claiming what is being actively erased,” Joudah writes, “I become presence.”
