Praise for You Must Live
“A light beam of a collection in our dark hours. These poets managed the seemingly impossible: to build life—affirming yet daring linguistic nodes among the rubble of our world and our world’s imagination. This is a landmark work, a center from which myriad new ways of thinking and being will flourish.”—Ocean Vuong
“Bowing down. In grief and in gratitude. I feel overwhelmed with respect and thanks for the enormous labors of Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, as well as Copper Canyon Press, [in] creating this comprehensive gathering of crucial Gazan and West Bank voices, and writing such an eloquent contextual introduction. After years of massive sorrow and staggering dehumanization, this collection represents some of what has been lost—the neighborhoods; the exquisite loving consciousness; the proud and humble society; the triumphant bravery of precious human beings, families like yours and mine, who never stopped speaking and singing. Over here in the United States, we sorrow, we weep, we feel fury at the role our own country has chosen in this disaster, and understand little of what human beings do to one another. But this we can hopefully all understand—the honoring of other people’s stories and lives. Here are their stanzas which served as oars to help them get through the worst days any of us can even imagine. This book should be required reading for every human being, especially those who have contributed to this disaster. It testifies to Gazan beauty and love. And hopefully it will also find the honorable young students worldwide who have taken it upon themselves to advocate for justice and equality and the end of occupation and oppression. This book is a triumph after ongoing catastrophe.”—Naomi Shihab Nye
“Everyone with any humanity in the face of what is happening in Palestine should read this outstanding collection of poetry. These words emerging from among the ruins of Gaza and from the devastation in the West Bank have an electric immediacy, a burning anger, a sadness over what has been lost, and a graphic sense of time and place which, for some of these poets, is a recording of their last moments of life. It is impossible to read these poems and remain unmoved, impossible not to feel awe for their courage, and impossible not to share their mixed anger and sadness. Like the greatest war poetry, more than any picture, any video, any reportage can, the words of these poets convey the full horror of life under siege. 'One day, everyone will have always been against this,' Omar El Akkad wrote. Whenever that day comes, this collection will stand as a shining memorial to poets who wrote in unimaginable conditions during the dark time we are living in, when not enough of us were against it to stop it.”—Rashid Khalidi
“You Must Live gathers testamentary art miraculously composed, in the midst of genocide, by poets who have borne unspeakable losses, the majority of whom are still within the debris fields of Gaza, survivors now on the precipice of famine, yet with pens in hand, in the ancient tradition of wuquf 'ala al—atlal, 'standing in the ruins' of the beloved. This is Gaza, as reported by the poets who 'sing [war] to sleep' in qasidas and shorter odes, prose poems and meditations, in the sea—rhythms of their forebears, in the hope to 'convince the dead they are still alive' among a people 'sleeping in tents. / More fragile than clouds.' These poems are flares in a terrible darkness, here to show us the way back to our humanity."”—Carolyn Forché
“Is great poetry still possible in the twenty—first century? Open this book and read Khaled Juma’s 'The Gravedigger,' written in Gaza in 2024—and you will have your answer, which is yes. This book is filled with poems of utter urgency, poems that give us wisdom, in the midst of devastation, despite devastation: 'The children of the al—Bakr family. / I can’t find them running in the streets. / I can’t find them on Gaza’s beach. / Only here they are still running, inside their photograph,' writes Yahya Ashour. These poems stun—not just because they speak out of the place that has been bombed—out by the weapons our country has supplied while we watched—but because the voices that rise up in these words are incredibly memorable and talented. So much love in these elegies, so much power. My awe and gratitude especially goes to the translators for these vivid and compelling English versions. Once upon a time in the mid—twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova thought that poets talk to each other across time and geography, even if they don’t know each other’s languages. She called this 'correspondences in the air.' This book is full of such correspondences, the echoing makes history’s crimes even more horrific to us, and the poetic gesture even more clarifying.”—Ilya Kaminsky
“Erudite translator—editors Abu Odeh and Bloor have created a timely and important bilingual anthology of recent poems by 30 Palestinian poets living in Gaza and the West Bank. These potent poems are shattering and sublime, intimate and communal. . . . With war, deprivation, and suffering in Gaza and violence and injustice in the West Bank, dire horrors mostly hidden from the world, poets as courageous witnesses are desperately needed. Read and share these testaments to the fact that neither bloodshed or even death can extinguish truth and poetry.”—Raúl Niño, Booklist STARRED REVIEW
“Each poem in You Must Live (Copper Canyon, 2025) is accompanied by the year and place of its composition. Forty—three times, in small, faint italics: Gaza, 2024. Sometimes the West Bank. Sometimes a few years before that. It's a convention you see most often in editions of writers long dead, when scattered drafts are painstakingly reassembled in a variorum edition. Or in collections of letters, when you peer over the shoulders of the dead as they tell each other how each day was with them. In the pages of this anthology, as chronological time eddies and ruptures around trauma, as scenes of actual deprivation are braided with sensuously rendered memory and imagination, and as poets address those dead and those about to be with equal loving plainness, the heartbreak is, momentarily, lightened; the murdered turn to us, and open their eyes, before falling back to sleep.”—Noah Warren, Kismet
“You Must Live: New Poetry From Palestine is both a prayer and an order: that the rich polyphony of voices continue to live in face of ongoing genocide. Bringing together works from contemporary poets currently living in Palestine (with the exception of Yahya Ashour, who was stranded in Michigan when the war began), the poems in this collection vibrate with present urgency, acting as a testimony not only to the brutality of the Israeli invasion, but the vibrancy of the fractured literary community in Gaza.”—Christopher Alexander, Asymptote
“You Must Live embodies this duality of power and openness, making room for grief and sorrow, alongside nostalgia, memories, and dreams of a gentler future."—Amira Hayat, Poetry Wales
