Fady Joudah

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.”

Poems

[...]

"Few books of American poetry seem to me as essential as this one. These poems blaze into the visionary." --MARY SZYBIST

Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance

Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic is the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his poems Joudah explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget.”

The Earth in the Attic

From Fady Joudah, an elegant collection of poems that shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and the horoscope.

Tethered to Stars

Joudah, an ER physician who worked with Doctors Without Borders, is a master storyteller who refuses to dramatize or withhold

Alight

Erdag Goknar

Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival

Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival Staff

Murat Nemet-Nejat

Hatice Orun

Jeffrey Kahrs

Winners of the Fifth Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition Staff

The festival chapbook includes an essay on Mahmoud Darwish's poetry by Fady Joudah, original translations of Turkish poets, Nazim Hikmet, Gulten Akin and Birhan Keskin and poems by the winners of the Fifth Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition.

A Chapbook of Talks and Poetry

Fifth Annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival

Amjad Nāṣir

Amjad Nasser's masterful syncopated lyrical prose brings to life the once-lost city of Petra, unknown to the Western world until 1812 when it was rediscovered by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Fady Joudah provides a powerful translation of this contemporary Jordanian epic, which doubles as travel guide to one of the world's wonders. In Petra: the Concealed Rose, we move between love and death, history and myth, Orientalism and Feminism, representation and presence until we are face-to-face with this marvel, able to feel its textures, breathe its air, and smell its scents. This is a timeless work of art where "symmetry repeats / But dimensions vary," and Nasser embodies the rocky desert rose to its perfect imperfection.

The Concealed Rose

Petra

Emerging in the era of text messages and tweets comes a dynamic new poetic form—the 160-character, haiku-like "textu"

Textu

Emerging in the era of tweets and text messages comes a new poetic form - textu. The 'u' in textu echos the one in haiku, and also emphasizes the intimate you. A textu poem has a single rule - be exactly 160 characters long. As theme, form and style are wide open, a textu reveals new possibilities and poetry in unexpected ways.

Joe Sacco

Eileen Myles

Bao Phi

Naomi Shihab Nye

Ahdaf Soueif

Natalie Diaz

Hisham Matar

Yazan Khalili

George Abraham

Hala Alyan

Najwan Darwish

Sahar Mustafah

Naomi Wallace

Kevin Coval

Marc Lamont Hill

Khaled Mattawa

Jehan Bseiso

Nathalie Handal

Fargo Tbakhi

Ed Bok Lee

Donal O'Kelly

Zaina Alsous

Najla Said

Ismail Khalidi

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lina AlSharif

Janan Alexandra

Zeina Azzam

Bryonn Bain

Summer Farah

Mandy Shunnarah

Marking seventy years of displacement and occupation in Palestine, Mizna presents The Palestine Issue, centering the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the rich literature it has spurred, guest edited by playwright and poet Ismail Khalidi. Acclaimed authors engage with seven decades of resilience and creativity in the face of catastrophe, sharing work that combats erasure by remembering, as well as by imagining possible (and impossible) futures.

The Palestine Issue

Mizna

An exquisite and humane collection set to leave its mark on American poetics of the body and the body politic. In Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, Fady Joudah has written love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved. Here he celebrates moments of delight and awe with his wife, his mentors, his friends, and the beauty of the natural world. Yet he also finds tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared, bringing together the language of medicine with the language of desire in images at once visceral and vulnerable. A symptomatic moon. A peach, quartered like a heart, and a heart, quartered like a peach. “I call the finding of certain things loss.” Joudah is a translator between the heart and the mind, the flesh and the more-than-flesh, the word body and the world body—and between languages, with a polyglot’s hyperresonant sensibility. In “Sagittal Views,” the book’s middle section, Joudah collaborates with Golan Haji, a Kurdish Syrian writer, to foreground the imaginative act of constructing memory and history. Together they mark the place the past occupies in the body, the cut that “runs deeper than speech.” Generous in its scope, inventive in its movements and syntax, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance is a richly rewarding and indispensable collection.

Nick Montfort

David Baker

Harryette Mullen

Jennifer Scappettone

John Taylor

Philip Levine

Gary Snyder

Johanna Drucker

Bruce Bond

Curzio Malaparte

Alice Notley

Lyn Hejinian

Charles Wright

Jerome Rothenberg

Ilya Kaminsky

Rita Dove

Dana Levin

David Huerta

Martin Woodside

Juana Adcock

Rachel Galvin

Marc Vincenz

Alan Sondheim

MARGENTO

mIEKAL aND

David Jhave Johnston

Chris Funkhouser

Brian Kim Stefans

Maria Mencia

John Cayley & Daniel C. Howe

Jim Carpenter

Sandy Baldwin

JD McClatchy

GC Waldrep

Page Hill Starzinger

Șerban Foarță

Stephanie Strickland & Ian Hatcher

Babylonians as Americans as Babylonians

Jared Pierce

A Computationally Assembled Anthology / Antologie asamblată computațional

"US" Poets Foreign Poets / Noi poeți "americani" poeți străini

A collection born of polyphony and the rhythms of our cosmos—intimate in its stakes, celestial in its dreams. Tethered to Stars inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire. With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Fady Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human: “We are other worms / for other silk roads.” The solemn, the humorous, the erotic, the transcendent—all of it, in Joudah’s poems, steeped in the lexicon of the natural world. “When I say honey,” says one lover, “I’m asking you whose pollen you contain.” “And when I say honey,” replies another, “you grip my sweetness / on your life, stigma and anthophile.” Teeming with life but tinged with a sublime proximity to death, Tethered to Stars is a collection that flows “between nuance and essentialization,” from one of our most acclaimed poets.

Fady Joudah

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