Incredibly sharp and moving poetry. I don’t often read poetry, mostly because I never quite feel smart enough to get it, but these words just rattled around my body in the best way. Having just finished The Hundred Years’ War in Palestine (nonfiction) and Evil Eye (fiction), folding in poetry into my understanding of the Nakba and Palestinian history/identity/struggle has felt like turning all of the lights on. This collection was a love letter to his grandmother, to his country, and to those that fight for liberation. 

“In Jerusalem, every footstep is a grave.
This was only love:
her skeleton is that of the tree’s,
roots stitched into land into identity.
Separation is like
unmaking love
ungluing names to places
undoing God.”

“Here we know two things: death and the few breaths before it.”