Alight

by Fady Joudah

Overview

The poems in Alight alternate between the estranging familial and strangely familiar, between burning and illumination. As father, husband, and physician, Fady Joudah gives children and vulnerable others voice in this hauntingly lyrical collection, where, with quiet ferociousness, one’s self can be reclaimed from suffering’s grip over mind and spirit.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, translator, and physician of internal medicine. He received his medical training from the Medical College of Georgia and University of Texas, and served with Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Louise Glück. In 2010 he received a PEN translation award for his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619321144
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	07/03/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	110
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Fady Joudah: Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, translator, and physician of internal medicine. He received his medical training from the Medical College of Georgia and University of Texas, and served with Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Louise Glück. In 2010 he received a PEN translation award for his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Table of Contents

Tenor 3

After 4

Listening 13

Mimesis 14

Schoolgirl 15

Hands 16

Also 17

Border 18

Checkpoint 19

Still Life 20

A Kindness 22

Memory Full 23

Siblings 24

Smoke 25

In the Picture 26

I Was There 27

Museum 28

Holy Numbers 30

Blue Fly 37

The Very Hungry Caterpillar 38

Crow on Saccharine 39

For 40

Abundance 41

Birth 42

Záhrada 45

Waterproof 47

Sleep 48

Poem 49

Decadence 50

Garden 51

"Who Has No Land Has No Sea" 52

Twice a River 53

The Bedouin Poem 55

A Line for Water 56

The Security Level Is Yellow 61

Into Life 62

About the Author 65

Editorial Reviews

Our age is a checkpoint” writes Joudah (winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets) in his second collection. These deeply unsettling poems draw from Joudah’s work as a physician with Doctors Without Borders, evoking the fight for survival through enjambed lines that lack punctuation. Inefficient bureaucracy and preventable death haunt these lines: “I was trying to listen to your baby’s heartbeat/ With a gadget a century old.” The violence in the collection proves bipartite: political unrest the land is subject to, “Where the rebels came and went/ And ran into the government boys// Her girl’s femur the size of the bullet,” and the violence of illness resulting from lack of medical care. Even the animal kingdom is inflected through this lens, “caterpillars that eat their mothers and taxed pronouns.” Joudah conveys suffering without foregoing lyricism, unearthing striking linguistic combinations—“Humvee probability,” “pregnant mistletoes”—that enact a physician’s precision and a poet’s descriptive prowess. The winding nature of these poems suggests the lasting nature of the struggle described, the lack of resolution or reprieve: “To seduce memory/ into song/ to twist it/ in a twister county,” “To pray surrounded by guards/ to pray to the guards or/ to the invisible gods in the guards or the one surrounding the guards.” (June)

Publishers Weekly