...: Poems - Softcover

Joudah, Fady

Softcover

ISBN 10: 163955128X ISBN 13: 9781639551286

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2024

Synopsis

Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry

Winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize

A Reading the West Book Award Finalist

From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

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.”

About this title

About the Author

Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, he has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Arab American Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and the American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

[...]
I am unfinished business.
The business that did not finish me

or my parents
won’t leave my children

in peace. In my right hand,

a paper. In my left, a feather.
To toss, to quill, to meet

my terminal velocity.
I forget Palestine

has a kind way of remembering
those who mark it for slaughter,

and those it marks for life.
I write for the future

because my present is demolished.
I fly to the future

to retrieve my demolished present
as a legible past. To see

what isn’t hard to see
in a world that doesn’t.

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 163955128X
• ISBN 13: 9781639551286
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 100