Rock Flight

A powerfully moving debut poetry collection about the violence of colonialist occupation

One more rock thrown onto the pile to tumble the mountain on my chest

 ―Hasib Hourani

Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is a book-length poem that, over seven chapters, follows a single personal and historical narrative centered on the violent occupation of Palestine. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions, and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within Palestine and across the diaspora. Searing and fierce, tender and pleading, rock flight invites the reader to embark on an exploration of space while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Through the whole, Hourani moves between poetry and prose, historical events and meditations on language, Fluxus-like instructions and interactions with friends, strangers, and family.

As incantatory and stirring as Inger Christensen’s alphabet or Raúl Zurita’s Inri, rock flight adapts themes of displacement and refusal into an interactive reading experience where the book becomes an object in flux.

Hasib Hourani, born in Bahrain in 1996, is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, artsworker, and educator who lives in so-called Australia. He is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Scheme, and his 2021 essay “when we blink” appears in the anthology Against Disappearance. Hourani was awarded The Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund in 2022 and has been a fellow at the Varuna National Writers House in2021 and 2022.