[...] / Fady Joudah / 2024
I would highly recommend reading […] in a book club or group. Being a Palestinian writer in 2024 means the genocide and your familiar struggles being thrust into the spotlight like never before, alongside all the political baggage and expectations that come with such a moment. Here, Joudah resists becoming a sole spokesperson, someone who sentimentalizes or serves as a catalyst for catharsis. Inevitably, this has created a collection that can be hard to parse on your own at times. There’s a resistance in the silences here, in the naming of so many poems as […] in a way that makes some of the poems harder to remember, much in the same way the onslaught of death and the faces and the dismembered body parts on our screen become lost to actual memory. It was reading these poems in conversation with peers that really made their brilliance shine through for me. i had the blessing of having a Palestinian woman in the room during my book club who could speak to how certain poems evoke a specific set of war memories for her. I particularly adored the maqams in this collection. I recommend folks to listen to Joudah read “Dedication”—what I would argue is the most “accessible” poem in the collection and the sort of poem people expected and wanted from Palestinian poets this year. Joudah reads it with a rhythm and energy practically foreign to the loud, slammy US circuit for poems like these. 4.5/5