[...] by Fady Joudah is a 2024 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry

Please join us in honoring and celebrating […] by Fady Joudah, 2024 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

“Fady Joudah’s […] scribes the elliptical seam between heritage and history into a sustained meditation on war, displacement, and love. Punctuated with the music of maqam in the marrow of its mission, this timeless collection illuminates an existential Palestinian struggle that rises to the universal through Joudah’s deft, querying verse.”—National Book Award judges citation

From the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize winner and one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, this urgent and essential collection combats the erasure of Palestinian resistance and life.

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. These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending us on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

Milkweed Editions has had the privilege of working with Fady Joudah for the last seven years—from Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018) and Tethered to Stars (2021) to You Can Be the Last Leaf (2022), a translation of contemporary Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s collection, named a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Translation.

Pick up your copy of […] from your favorite independent bookseller or library today to experience this award-winning collection. Learn more about Fady Joudah, his poetry collections, and translation work here.