What do you think?
Rate this book
[...]: Poems
From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.
FadyÌýJoudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,â€� 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.Ìý
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 the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,â€� Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.â€� 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.Ìý°Ú…] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.â€�
FadyÌýJoudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,â€� 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.Ìý
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 the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,â€� Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.â€� 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.Ìý°Ú…] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.â€�
82 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 5, 2024
88 people are currently reading
3,781 people want to read
About the author
Fady Joudah
25Ìýbooks77ÌýfollowersJoudah was born in Austin, Texas in 1971 to Palestinian refugee parents, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He returned to the United States to study to become a doctor, first attending the University of Georgia in Athens, and then the Medical College of Georgia, before completing his medical training at the University of Texas. Joudah currently practices as an ER physician in Houston, Texas. He has also volunteered abroad with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders.
Joudah's poetry has been published in a variety of publications, including Poetry, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner and Crab Orchard Review.
In 2006, he published The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of recent poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish translated from Arabic, which was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
In 2012, Joudah published Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, a collection of poems by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan translated from Arabic, which won the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
His book of poetry Alight was published in 2013.
In 2017, Joudah translated Zaqtan's The Silence That Remains.
His 2021 poetry collection, Tethered to the Stars, was cited by Cleveland Review of Books as a poetry collection that "does not teach us how to answer any question it poses with a stylized rhetoric, a self-important flourish; the poems model a lyrical thinking which prompts the question itself."
Joudah won the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, given to an American writer of “exceptional talent. His work entitled [...] was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlist and longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.
Joudah's poetry has been published in a variety of publications, including Poetry, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner and Crab Orchard Review.
In 2006, he published The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of recent poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish translated from Arabic, which was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
In 2012, Joudah published Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, a collection of poems by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan translated from Arabic, which won the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
His book of poetry Alight was published in 2013.
In 2017, Joudah translated Zaqtan's The Silence That Remains.
His 2021 poetry collection, Tethered to the Stars, was cited by Cleveland Review of Books as a poetry collection that "does not teach us how to answer any question it poses with a stylized rhetoric, a self-important flourish; the poems model a lyrical thinking which prompts the question itself."
Joudah won the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, given to an American writer of “exceptional talent. His work entitled [...] was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlist and longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 143 reviews
November 21, 2024
�I write for the future / because my present is demolished,� Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah tells us at the start of his newest collection of poetry simply titled [...]. A finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in poetry, [...] is a harrowing collection that came together rather quickly in �about ten weeks,� the poet , �between October and December 2023� and chronicles an emotional confrontation with the ongoing war and violence against Palestinians. �I have a heart that rots, / resists, and hope� Joudah writes in one of the many poems that share the collections titular ellipses and each poem finds said heart overflowing into gorgeously crafted language that captures the long pain of a century of conflict, grief and loss while pushing back against the erasure of Palestinians and the orchestrated refusal to name their suffering as such. �The passive voice,� he writes early on, �is your killer’s voice.� A brief collection, but one that feels significantly greater than the sum of its parts, [...] is a mourning for Palestine still full of aspirations of hope and a commitment to love where �I refuse / what the war wants,� � he writes, �that the path I seek in peace be sought through war.� It is certainly a must read.
°Ú…]
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.
Fady Joudah is a poet you likely already recognize even if the name doesn’t ring a bell. Periodically his poem Mimesis goes viral on social after mass tragedies, the poem in which the speaker’s daughter �wouldn’t hurt a spider� or tear down its web made in the handlebars of her bicycle because �that’s how others / Become refugees isn’t it?� You can read it . A translator as well as poet and always with a creative eye towards language—his 2013 collection Textu was comprised entirely of poems that mimicked social media and constrained by using exactly 160 characters in each poem—Joudah returns with a collection that once again looks to the oppressed and erased to speak up and �my voice, / thought voiceless / because stateless, gave voice / to a noisy world.� In an , he describes these poems as an attempt at reclamation:
The grief of Palestine, a �state / of perishing beauty,� comes across on each page amidst condemnations of erasure, colonialism (�Fuck museums. / Wonder belongs to all.�) and a championing of love and language. As in the above poem, these poems are �to retrieve my demolished present / as a legible past,� even in a long history of conflict and generational trauma where, as always in war, the children are made to suffer. �What childhood does / a destroyed childhood beget?� he asks as he looks both forwards and backwards over the lengthy violence and uprooting of Palestinian people.
They did not mean to kill the children
They meant to.
Too many kids got in the way
of precisely imprecise
one-ton bombs
dropped a thousand and one times
over the children’s nights.
They will not forgive the children this sin.
They wanted to save them from future sins.
In all these poems there is a sense of loss, one that the ellipses of the title captures. An ellipses that shows an empty space—like the lives lost, the houses destroyed, the absence of empathy shown by global news—or also implies an unfinished continuation forward such as the opening poem which notes �I am unfinished business / The business that did not finish me� or the seemingly endless wars. �It insisted on being wordless,� Joudah said of the ellipses title (it reminds me a bit of � album that was simply parentheses) in an , �historically, poetry just floated in the memory of people without titles, living on in fragments.� He says it also nudges the idea of destruction and received questions around how these poems aren’t easily accessible in an internet search, but he says questions of that sort are �questions of capital, of audience, of culture industry, the same capital that drives the destruction of Palestine, among other places.� However, he admits he wasn’t thinking of that at the time and the truth is �Spiritually, no title spoke to me, and I wanted to listen to that silence.� Poetry is often like music, �a language of life,� and he quotes :
We should all listen to this music of life with him. But the silence also reminds us of the , not just the recent wave of and punishment of those who speak in defense of Palestine, but the long ongoing history of this even before Oct 7th, 2023. �Daily you wake up to the killing of my people,� he writes before asking �do you?� and addresses �Censored, the news. Shadow banned. McCarthyed.� Or these is the frequent calls to denounce Palestine.
Why don’t you denounce
what you ask me to denounce
we can do it together on the count of three.
Or you should go first
on account of your obsession�
He points out how as a Palestinian body he is often made into a personification of the war and target of �misguided vengence.� In the longest poem of the collection, the multi-part I Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams, he writes �I’m not a war but someone is // saying my mind, / canonized and colonized, is out of sync with the freedom of your…right to defend / the right to eradicate.� It is as if he must �condemn myself a little / for you to forgive yourself.� In this way, he is also pointing towards what he says in Yale Review as a way to reclaim his body:
But it is not just this present that he is reclaiming his body from. �When did the new war begin?� he asks before adding �whoever gets to write it most / gets to erase it best.� There are new wars while the old wars are ongoing and he winks at the reader say �The war you’re thinking of, I made / you think of, is a red herring� to remind us of this.
Not everyone
Is a physician
But sooner or later everyone
Fails to heal.
Though amidst all the destruction, Joudah reminds us that we are all united in the grand scope of history, both living and non-living things and we can communicate and process through language. This is a cause for hope. Though he also does not wish to be called a poet of witness:
2024 has seen several collections that have begun to reject the marketable language around poetry that speaks to a moment, such as ’s recent collection Bluff where he levies criticism at poetry and the publishing industry, interrogating poets complicity in �the joy industrial complex� and wondering what to make of moments where �we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty� For Joudah, this is not about witness, and he has discussed how the role of the poet is something we still do not fully grasp.
For Joudah, this isn’t about witness. This is an answer to the question 'how will I go on living
with orchestras that conduct my thirst?' This is about reclamation, rebuttal, resistance and above all, about empathy and love.
�Life says: I will make you to make love.
Love says: I make life so that I am.�
Love enters nearly every poem and keeps the collection from buckling under the emotional weight of all the grief and destruction. It is love that makes life, life that makes love, love that changes us and makes us realize we are �not the person I was / before I knew you were in the world.� There is also, as —a poet Joudah has translated into English—writes �an infinite love for my people in pain.� One of the longer poems, Dedication is nothing but such love for all those listed such as:
It is such love we must all hold on to, it is such love that gives us hope to be not afraid �from gleaming river / to glistening sea� and love all in between.
�Even cells / touch each other to say goodbye.�
A startling and strikingly beautiful collection, Fady Joudah’s [...] is a harrowing and haunting collection that confronts history and reminds us to hold fast to hope and love. Reclaiming his body, his voice, his �state / of perishing beauty,� from the violence and erasure all around, this is a powerful collection that reads with urgency. I urge you all to read it.
5/5
Hummingbird
Who here has not loved
like no one else in the world has
before them or since?
Your blood wondering what more
it can open up in your skin,
all the light rushing in like a fool
through the tiniest holes,
the invisible pores.
And then love ended.
You returned to yourself.
Who here has not lived
the passing
of all thinking
through the language of love?
°Ú…]
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.
Fady Joudah is a poet you likely already recognize even if the name doesn’t ring a bell. Periodically his poem Mimesis goes viral on social after mass tragedies, the poem in which the speaker’s daughter �wouldn’t hurt a spider� or tear down its web made in the handlebars of her bicycle because �that’s how others / Become refugees isn’t it?� You can read it . A translator as well as poet and always with a creative eye towards language—his 2013 collection Textu was comprised entirely of poems that mimicked social media and constrained by using exactly 160 characters in each poem—Joudah returns with a collection that once again looks to the oppressed and erased to speak up and �my voice, / thought voiceless / because stateless, gave voice / to a noisy world.� In an , he describes these poems as an attempt at reclamation:
�I needed to survive the hours of experiencing my annihilation livestreamed…in this book, I reclaim my death from the powers and politics that see me only through the death they deliver to my Palestinian body.�
The grief of Palestine, a �state / of perishing beauty,� comes across on each page amidst condemnations of erasure, colonialism (�Fuck museums. / Wonder belongs to all.�) and a championing of love and language. As in the above poem, these poems are �to retrieve my demolished present / as a legible past,� even in a long history of conflict and generational trauma where, as always in war, the children are made to suffer. �What childhood does / a destroyed childhood beget?� he asks as he looks both forwards and backwards over the lengthy violence and uprooting of Palestinian people.
They did not mean to kill the children
They meant to.
Too many kids got in the way
of precisely imprecise
one-ton bombs
dropped a thousand and one times
over the children’s nights.
They will not forgive the children this sin.
They wanted to save them from future sins.
In all these poems there is a sense of loss, one that the ellipses of the title captures. An ellipses that shows an empty space—like the lives lost, the houses destroyed, the absence of empathy shown by global news—or also implies an unfinished continuation forward such as the opening poem which notes �I am unfinished business / The business that did not finish me� or the seemingly endless wars. �It insisted on being wordless,� Joudah said of the ellipses title (it reminds me a bit of � album that was simply parentheses) in an , �historically, poetry just floated in the memory of people without titles, living on in fragments.� He says it also nudges the idea of destruction and received questions around how these poems aren’t easily accessible in an internet search, but he says questions of that sort are �questions of capital, of audience, of culture industry, the same capital that drives the destruction of Palestine, among other places.� However, he admits he wasn’t thinking of that at the time and the truth is �Spiritually, no title spoke to me, and I wanted to listen to that silence.� Poetry is often like music, �a language of life,� and he quotes :
�The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.�
We should all listen to this music of life with him. But the silence also reminds us of the , not just the recent wave of and punishment of those who speak in defense of Palestine, but the long ongoing history of this even before Oct 7th, 2023. �Daily you wake up to the killing of my people,� he writes before asking �do you?� and addresses �Censored, the news. Shadow banned. McCarthyed.� Or these is the frequent calls to denounce Palestine.
Why don’t you denounce
what you ask me to denounce
we can do it together on the count of three.
Or you should go first
on account of your obsession�
He points out how as a Palestinian body he is often made into a personification of the war and target of �misguided vengence.� In the longest poem of the collection, the multi-part I Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams, he writes �I’m not a war but someone is // saying my mind, / canonized and colonized, is out of sync with the freedom of your…right to defend / the right to eradicate.� It is as if he must �condemn myself a little / for you to forgive yourself.� In this way, he is also pointing towards what he says in Yale Review as a way to reclaim his body:
�In these poems of longing, I reclaim my body from the culture that wants to hear and read me only as a voice in the aftermath of disaster and as a wound at that, not much more.�
But it is not just this present that he is reclaiming his body from. �When did the new war begin?� he asks before adding �whoever gets to write it most / gets to erase it best.� There are new wars while the old wars are ongoing and he winks at the reader say �The war you’re thinking of, I made / you think of, is a red herring� to remind us of this.
Not everyone
Is a physician
But sooner or later everyone
Fails to heal.
Though amidst all the destruction, Joudah reminds us that we are all united in the grand scope of history, both living and non-living things and we can communicate and process through language. This is a cause for hope. Though he also does not wish to be called a poet of witness:
�Sometimes what we call poetry of witness, which is different from the witness of poetry, binds the poet to stereotype. And the market nurtures a stereotype, nurtures pity more than active empathy, until, of course, active empathy proves profitable, and the right thing to do.�
2024 has seen several collections that have begun to reject the marketable language around poetry that speaks to a moment, such as ’s recent collection Bluff where he levies criticism at poetry and the publishing industry, interrogating poets complicity in �the joy industrial complex� and wondering what to make of moments where �we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty� For Joudah, this is not about witness, and he has discussed how the role of the poet is something we still do not fully grasp.
� I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human: an ever-changing constant.�
For Joudah, this isn’t about witness. This is an answer to the question 'how will I go on living
with orchestras that conduct my thirst?' This is about reclamation, rebuttal, resistance and above all, about empathy and love.
�Life says: I will make you to make love.
Love says: I make life so that I am.�
Love enters nearly every poem and keeps the collection from buckling under the emotional weight of all the grief and destruction. It is love that makes life, life that makes love, love that changes us and makes us realize we are �not the person I was / before I knew you were in the world.� There is also, as —a poet Joudah has translated into English—writes �an infinite love for my people in pain.� One of the longer poems, Dedication is nothing but such love for all those listed such as:
�To the martyrs who witness from above, and the living who witness on the ground. To those who will be killed on the last day of the war. To those who will be killed on the first day after the war ends. To those who succumb in the humanitarian window of horror. An hour before the pause, a minute after. To those who die of a broken heart during and after the war. To those who gather their families to die together so that no survivor suffers survival alone. To those who scatter their families so that they’re not all wiped out from the civil record…To those who insist on homing their pigeons during the war. Have your pigeons come home? To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea.�
It is such love we must all hold on to, it is such love that gives us hope to be not afraid �from gleaming river / to glistening sea� and love all in between.
�Even cells / touch each other to say goodbye.�
A startling and strikingly beautiful collection, Fady Joudah’s [...] is a harrowing and haunting collection that confronts history and reminds us to hold fast to hope and love. Reclaiming his body, his voice, his �state / of perishing beauty,� from the violence and erasure all around, this is a powerful collection that reads with urgency. I urge you all to read it.
5/5
Hummingbird
Who here has not loved
like no one else in the world has
before them or since?
Your blood wondering what more
it can open up in your skin,
all the light rushing in like a fool
through the tiniest holes,
the invisible pores.
And then love ended.
You returned to yourself.
Who here has not lived
the passing
of all thinking
through the language of love?
October 19, 2024
This collection of poetry came on my radar because it’s been nominated for so many top awards this year, so my expectations were high…and somehow, they were exceeded. WOW, these poems pack a punch. If you want to have your heart broken in the most beautiful way, read this book.
March 27, 2024
"In Gaza, a girl and her brother
rescued their fish
from the rubble of airstrikes. A miracle
its tiny bowl
didn't shatter."
This collection of poetry by Palestinian poet, translator, and physician Fady Joudah is an immediate, in the moment, personal response to the war in Gaza. At least 17 members of his family were lost in the early days and as this book is released almost six months later, the genocide has only intensified. Little surprise then, that anger, bitterness, and pain run through these poems. But there is also beauty and small signs of hope, a belief in the value and goodness of life that the poet, as a parent, a doctor and a Palestinian, bears witness to. Poetry has long stood as a means to acknowledge the brutality of war, and Joudah, like the great Palestinian poets he has translated—Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan—knows that now, more than ever, it is important to be heard. This a critical work in this moment.
A longer review can be found here:
rescued their fish
from the rubble of airstrikes. A miracle
its tiny bowl
didn't shatter."
This collection of poetry by Palestinian poet, translator, and physician Fady Joudah is an immediate, in the moment, personal response to the war in Gaza. At least 17 members of his family were lost in the early days and as this book is released almost six months later, the genocide has only intensified. Little surprise then, that anger, bitterness, and pain run through these poems. But there is also beauty and small signs of hope, a belief in the value and goodness of life that the poet, as a parent, a doctor and a Palestinian, bears witness to. Poetry has long stood as a means to acknowledge the brutality of war, and Joudah, like the great Palestinian poets he has translated—Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan—knows that now, more than ever, it is important to be heard. This a critical work in this moment.
A longer review can be found here:
February 26, 2024
"What childhood does / a destroyed childhood beget?"
July 5, 2024
"I have a heart that rots, / resists, and hopes" (p. 69)
March 10, 2024
"Why don't you denounce", "Long ago we were lovers", "Dedication" & "Sunbird" were my favorites.
After reading this, I read an interview of Fady Joudah with Aria Aber where he talked about the formation of this book in the first two months of Israel's war on Gaza and how the title refused to be written, "insisted on being wordless." This book is not centered on marketability; it is centered on witnessing and focused acutely on longing and desire.
After reading this, I read an interview of Fady Joudah with Aria Aber where he talked about the formation of this book in the first two months of Israel's war on Gaza and how the title refused to be written, "insisted on being wordless." This book is not centered on marketability; it is centered on witnessing and focused acutely on longing and desire.
August 25, 2024
4.5🌟🌟🌟🌟
So freaking incredible to read poetry about Palestine.
"Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself
in my body? Oh how you love
my body, my house."
So freaking incredible to read poetry about Palestine.
"Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself
in my body? Oh how you love
my body, my house."
April 21, 2025
Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself
in my body? Oh how you love
my body, my house.
All too topical and yet relaxed, allowing the horror and the cost of such to be the spectacle at the expense of potential transformation. Oh, we weep but I personally don’t stand with--well any group, I simply mourn.
Although wary, I had hoped for more here. There is a suggestion that we compare a Gaza alongside capitalist inequality and that of climate change. Which pains us the most?
for you to forgive yourself
in my body? Oh how you love
my body, my house.
All too topical and yet relaxed, allowing the horror and the cost of such to be the spectacle at the expense of potential transformation. Oh, we weep but I personally don’t stand with--well any group, I simply mourn.
Although wary, I had hoped for more here. There is a suggestion that we compare a Gaza alongside capitalist inequality and that of climate change. Which pains us the most?
November 1, 2024
A moving collection of poems, some veered too much on the abstract side for my personal liking/understanding which is a me thing with poetry. I ended up liking more of the named poems then the ... ones, so maybe I'm just missing something there.
Read
November 18, 2024“To those who were killed because they refused to leave their homes to live in tents. To those who were killed on their way to the tents. To those who were killed in their tents with the cats they sheltered. To those who were killed in UN shelters and in schools. To those who were killed because they were medics, nurses, doctors, teachers, coders and de-coders, and the last honest journalists.
To those who gather their families to die together so that no survivor suffers alone. To those who scatter their families so that they're not all wiped out from the civil record."
To the elderly who endured 1948 and lived to see their descendants erased.�
To those who gather their families to die together so that no survivor suffers alone. To those who scatter their families so that they're not all wiped out from the civil record."
To the elderly who endured 1948 and lived to see their descendants erased.�
Read
July 20, 2024“To those who insist on homing their pigeons during the war. Have your pigeons come home? To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea.�
March 23, 2025
The job of a poet is not apolitical, and there is also often an immediacy to poetry involving an almost real-time response to what happens in the world. I think the average person's understanding of poetry conjures a slow writing process that's deep and reflective, but in some cases, the fuckery of the world calls for a commentary that's also reactionary and direct in its now-ness. Fady Joudah wrote the majority of this collection in ten weeks, in response to the U.S. and Israel's imperialism and genocide in Palestine, and it simultaneously invokes the history of violence and oppression alongside the current elimination of a population the U.S. media likes to call a "war" or "conflict".
As much as these poems are witness to the U.S.-funded mass killings in Gaza (Joudah reportedly lost 100 family members), they also don't shy away from criticism of U.S. citizens' reactions, which are often to support Israel's efforts or to ignore them completely. Western media plays a large role in this, designing and implementing propaganda that convincingly tells us there are two sides to what is, by definition, a genocide. When they feel such propaganda won't work, they also just don't talk about the issue at all ("Daily you wake up to the killing of my people. Do you?").
And so Joudah chronicles a violence, widespread across generations. The violence of Western imperialism against the oppressed self, the violence of media in its erasure of truth, the violence against love (but also love's perseverance). And always, of course, the purposeful-ness of that violence
Amidst all this, the book also centers love and joy, which are inexplicably weaved in with all the loss and destruction and even at times a wear on the mind and body ("Great joys exhaust me, / small ones bring me to tears."). The poems frequently reconcile with what love and joy actually are, how they manifest when they are so tied up in pain and how they almost have to be reimagined in a place of unending violence and death.
It is here that Joudah demonstrates the present and future of Palestine, in its people's unwavering humanity, in resilience and strength through love and joy. For populations oppressed by imperialism, these poems imagining and really insisting on a future existence is resistance.
Encompassing all that, the title [...] is a pictogram that transcends time and demands that the past and present violence will not define the present and future joy Palestinians will experience. Genocide and imperialism, though designed to erase and extinguish, don't signal a finality to an entire people and their culture and history, and the [...] is a placeholder for this notion. The LARB review likened it to waiting on someone to finish composing/sending a text, and maybe this is Palestinians waiting - for the rest of the world to stand against this...or for the empire to fall so they can reemerge victorious in their love and humanity.
They love you more when you're dead.
You're more alive to them dead.
As much as these poems are witness to the U.S.-funded mass killings in Gaza (Joudah reportedly lost 100 family members), they also don't shy away from criticism of U.S. citizens' reactions, which are often to support Israel's efforts or to ignore them completely. Western media plays a large role in this, designing and implementing propaganda that convincingly tells us there are two sides to what is, by definition, a genocide. When they feel such propaganda won't work, they also just don't talk about the issue at all ("Daily you wake up to the killing of my people. Do you?").
And so Joudah chronicles a violence, widespread across generations. The violence of Western imperialism against the oppressed self, the violence of media in its erasure of truth, the violence against love (but also love's perseverance). And always, of course, the purposeful-ness of that violence
They did not mean to kill the children.
They meant to.
Too many kids got in the way
of precisely imprecise
one-ton bombs
dropped a thousand and one times
over the children's nights.
Amidst all this, the book also centers love and joy, which are inexplicably weaved in with all the loss and destruction and even at times a wear on the mind and body ("Great joys exhaust me, / small ones bring me to tears."). The poems frequently reconcile with what love and joy actually are, how they manifest when they are so tied up in pain and how they almost have to be reimagined in a place of unending violence and death.
What is joy? I was told it can be a family
that held on to their father's corpse against the flood
so it wouldn't wash away.
It is here that Joudah demonstrates the present and future of Palestine, in its people's unwavering humanity, in resilience and strength through love and joy. For populations oppressed by imperialism, these poems imagining and really insisting on a future existence is resistance.
Encompassing all that, the title [...] is a pictogram that transcends time and demands that the past and present violence will not define the present and future joy Palestinians will experience. Genocide and imperialism, though designed to erase and extinguish, don't signal a finality to an entire people and their culture and history, and the [...] is a placeholder for this notion. The LARB review likened it to waiting on someone to finish composing/sending a text, and maybe this is Palestinians waiting - for the rest of the world to stand against this...or for the empire to fall so they can reemerge victorious in their love and humanity.
March 6, 2025
"I forget Palestine/ has a kind of 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."
"To those who found a way to fall in love, make love, construct a romance, a secret rendezvous, hold a wedding, and dream of moon and stars. To those who insist on homing their pigeons during the war. Have the pigeons come home? To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea."
A truly beautiful collection of poetry ranging from love, yearning, aching processing grief of many forms, mourning his home country and the people of Palestine. This was published in 2024, so the rage and heartache is so very raw. The final dedication served as such a devastating summation of every piece of poetry, detailing the impact of the genocide. Art is truly the power of resilience.
EDIT: Beautiful collection of poetry
“To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea.�
Full little review to come but ow
"To those who found a way to fall in love, make love, construct a romance, a secret rendezvous, hold a wedding, and dream of moon and stars. To those who insist on homing their pigeons during the war. Have the pigeons come home? To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea."
A truly beautiful collection of poetry ranging from love, yearning, aching processing grief of many forms, mourning his home country and the people of Palestine. This was published in 2024, so the rage and heartache is so very raw. The final dedication served as such a devastating summation of every piece of poetry, detailing the impact of the genocide. Art is truly the power of resilience.
EDIT: Beautiful collection of poetry
“To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea.�
Full little review to come but ow
June 20, 2024
This was a beautiful collection that distracted me at work.
October 22, 2024
“To those who insist on homing their pigeons during the war. Have your pigeons come home? To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea.�
February 2, 2025
This is how Fady Joudah ended his collection and I just love it:
Sunbird
I flit
from gleaming river
to glistening sea.
From all that we
to all that me.
Fresh east to salty west,
southern sweet
and northern free.
There is a lake
between us.
And aquifers
for cactus
and basins
of anemone
from the river
to the sea.
From womb
to breath, and one
with oneness
I be:
from the river
to the sea.
Sunbird
I flit
from gleaming river
to glistening sea.
From all that we
to all that me.
Fresh east to salty west,
southern sweet
and northern free.
There is a lake
between us.
And aquifers
for cactus
and basins
of anemone
from the river
to the sea.
From womb
to breath, and one
with oneness
I be:
from the river
to the sea.
October 17, 2024
I liked it. Emphasis on "liked."
Read
December 6, 2024I am unfinished business.
The business that did not finish me
or my parents
won't leave my children
in peace.
The business that did not finish me
or my parents
won't leave my children
in peace.
December 17, 2024
Vi är inte rädda för kärlek från floden till havet.
!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!
December 22, 2024
Tror att den här gör sig mycket bättre på originalspråk? En del av rytmen och strofernas tunga vittnesbörd går lite förlorad av den tillrättalagda svenskan. Väldigt tvära kast vad gäller verkshöjd och tematik.
February 19, 2025
this was incredible, just had to stop after every poem
February 26, 2025
Great collections, very excited to hear Joudah speak on Friday!
December 12, 2024
This is an interesting and very thoughtful collection of poems on Palestine being Palestinian-American. The author's life as a doctor is clear, as is the fact that he practices in the US (Houston) and is American (born in Texas to refugee parents). Many of the poems have no names, or are just [...] the same as the title of the book. He is clearly deeply affected by the ongoing war on/attack on Palestine and Palestinian territories, but he is also far removed and knows and feels that.
This author is a doctor, a translator, a husband and father, and an award-winning poet. This is amazing to me.
This author is a doctor, a translator, a husband and father, and an award-winning poet. This is amazing to me.
July 8, 2024
Joudah ends the piece "Dedication," a long and heartbreaking list in prose-form of Palestinians during the genocide, with:
"To those who found a way to fall in love, make love, construct a romance, a secret rendezvous, hold a wedding, and dream of moon and stars. To those who insist on homing their pigeons during the war. Have your pigeons come home? To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea."
It is not hope that remains but love. What immense courage it takes to love and love again, and love again! [ ... ] speaks from that love. We're well advised to follow it and never forget.
"To those who found a way to fall in love, make love, construct a romance, a secret rendezvous, hold a wedding, and dream of moon and stars. To those who insist on homing their pigeons during the war. Have your pigeons come home? To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea."
It is not hope that remains but love. What immense courage it takes to love and love again, and love again! [ ... ] speaks from that love. We're well advised to follow it and never forget.
December 28, 2024
“They did not mean to kill the children.
They meant to.
Too many kids got in the way
of precisely imprecise
one-ton bombs
dropped a thousand and one times
over the children’s nights.�
A must-read.
They meant to.
Too many kids got in the way
of precisely imprecise
one-ton bombs
dropped a thousand and one times
over the children’s nights.�
A must-read.
February 4, 2025
4.5 stars
delicious delicious prose. it feels hard to rate this one, as it is so personal and beautiful. not unlike the work of ross gay, i like a poet who addresses me as i am, who speaks to me as the reader, who picks me up in their palm and says "look at this! look at this world!" see highlights for further insight
delicious delicious prose. it feels hard to rate this one, as it is so personal and beautiful. not unlike the work of ross gay, i like a poet who addresses me as i am, who speaks to me as the reader, who picks me up in their palm and says "look at this! look at this world!" see highlights for further insight
December 24, 2024
War is without mercies� can we have human experience like love and a wedding with the moon and stars? Humanitarian like the homing pigeon that finds itself homeless what can be said of war and it’s crime
April 20, 2024
Great Poems
Eloquent poems from a Palestinian poet, written before the recent war. Very moving and discusses what Palestinians experience on a daily basis.
Eloquent poems from a Palestinian poet, written before the recent war. Very moving and discusses what Palestinians experience on a daily basis.
May 6, 2024
"we are not afraid of love from the river to the sea."
October 29, 2024
“Garden, I choose you. You are the time I want to lose.�
Displaying 1 - 30 of 143 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.