Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece

New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year

American Library Association Notable Book of the Year

Best Translated Book of the Year, Longlist, National Book Critics Circle Prize

World Literature Today Best Translated Book of the Year

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Like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Vallejo, Gazan poet Nasser Rabah embodies the magnificent possibilities of the human spirit and imagination under extreme conditions.

"Nasser Rabah is my favorite living poet in Palestine. The musicality of his lines could replace my heartbeats and I would feel more than alive."―Mosab Abu Toha, author of Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear

Born in Gaza in 1963, Rabah spent some of his formative years in Egypt, before returning to Gaza in his early twenties, where he has lived ever since. There, among the generations who built its neighborhoods and populate its villages, in a place of great natural beauty and vibrant cities, living under constant surveillance, military occupation, blockade, siege and regular attack, in a culture steeped in literary and spiritual tradition, Rabah developed his distinctively singular vision and poetics.

This is Rabah's first book in English translation. The poems include a selection from three of his published collections, along with new poems written after October 2023, during the full-scale Israeli assault on Gaza. Throughout, we find a combination of irreverence and fidelity to tradition, a sense of surrealism infusing the depiction of everyday incomprehensibilities, and an unsettling, delicate tenderness always on edge in an atmosphere of sensory inundation and emotional saturation. Rabah's poems can be raw and uninhibited by social or literary conventions, exploring and questioning one's relationship to divinity in absurd circumstances while confronting the sacred cows of his own society, along with the sometimes voyeuristic interest from those on the outside of it. His poetry constantly interrogates―sometimes playfully and sometimes in utter existential despair―the paradoxes and difficulties of expression and of writing itself. Nasser Rabah is a poet we have much to learn from.

This is a bi-lingual edition and includes the original versions in Arabic.

Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963. He got his BA in Agricultural Science in 1985, before going on to work as Director of the Communication Department in the Agriculture Ministry. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union and has published five collections of poetry, Running After Dead Gazelles (2003); One of Nobody (2011); Passersby with Light Clothes (2014); Water Thirsty for Water (2017); Eulogy for the Robin (2021), and two novels, Since approximately an hour (2018), and The Enclosure of the Gazelle (2024). Some of his poems have been translated into English, French and Hebrew. He lives in Gaza.

Poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay's over 20 books include After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future, Islanders, and the forthcoming CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books, and Follow the Person: Archival Encounters.

Emna Zghal is a visual artist and professional interpreter with an acute sense of poetry in a number of languages.

Khaled al-Hilli is a life-long student of the Arabic language and grammar and now professor of Arabic whose own life journey has immersed him in various Arabic milieus, from Iraqi to Lebanese and Levantine. He lives in New York City.

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, published by City Lights, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. His new book of poems is Forest of Noise. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his "Letter from Gaza" columns for The New Yorker.