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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.”

I.

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Stick Figures 9

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Mimesis 13

Bonsai Weeping Willow 14

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Progress Notes 20

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Eid Mubarak 29

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II.

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I Seem as If I Am: Ten Maqams 38

Maqam for a Green Silence 49

III.

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Kufic 54

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Barzakh 58

Leaves, Glass 60

Maqam for Apricot 61

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Ode to an Onion 63

No Kissing, No Biting 64

This Time, Actual Bees 65

IV.

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[...] 71 Hummingbird 72

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Dedication 74

V.

Sunbird 79

Acknowledgments 81