[...]: Poems

by Fady Joudah

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Acclaimed poet and translator Fady Joudah imbues their poetry with humanity, stark as it is. Sometimes the images are gentle, sometimes harsh, but together they create a palpable picture of life for Palestinians and the perseverance they have — and must continue — to endure. This is not just a window into the mind of a people but to the soul.

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639551286
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Fady Joudah is the author of […], a finalist for the National Book Award. 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 Series of Younger Poets competition, 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.

Read an Excerpt

[...]
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.

Table of Contents

I.

[...] 3

[...] 4

[...] 6

[...] 7

[...] 8

Stick Figures 9

[...] 12

Mimesis 13

Bonsai Weeping Willow 14

[...] 15

[...] 16

[...] 18

[...] 19

Progress Notes 20

[...] 22

[...] 23

[...] 24

[...] 26

[...] 27

[...] 28

Eid Mubarak 29

[...] 30

[...] 31

[...] 32

[...] 33

II.

[...] 37

I Seem as If I Am: Ten Maqams 38

Maqam for a Green Silence 49

III.

[...] 53

Kufic 54

[...] 56

Barzakh 58

Leaves, Glass 60

Maqam for Apricot 61

[...] 62

Ode to an Onion 63

No Kissing, No Biting 64

This Time, Actual Bees 65

IV.

[...] 69

[...] 71 Hummingbird 72

[...] 73

Dedication 74

V.

Sunbird 79

Acknowledgments 81