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“Joudah’s poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”

“A luminous aesthete who thinks in nuance, in refinements.”

“Joudah has been writing essential poetry for some time […] forging a lyric that works at the crosscurrents of reportage, myth, and dream where falsely imagined boundaries―of gender, nation, family―fray and unfold. […] Joudah’s gifts for articulating the intersections of bewilderment, tenderness, rage, and grief are fully alive.”―

“If you love poetry, or simply wonder what powerful poetry is and what it can do for you, then the poems of Fady Joudah are waiting for you.”

“With a quiet certainty, Joudah names those ordinary things that hold everything in focus, grounded in a fabular mystery that resonates in the twenty-first century.”

“Joudah’s poems defy classification, not because they perplex, but because of their remarkable power of synthesis. His mode is the lyric, with its concinnity and necessary music, but his lyrics compress, contain and then liberate the matter of narrative: allegory, fable, folktale, parable, documentary. He is a superb, seductive storyteller.”

“Within […] pages, the poet’s voice travels across centuries and continents, historicizing the fate of the Palestinian people while illuminating the bewilderment, eros, and spirituality of everyday life. Joudah’s integrity and craftsmanship elasticize the boundaries of the lyric and embrace a reckoning with colonial violence. But these glimmering, layered poems defy easy categorization, even as they brim with the wisdom we inherit from the dead.”

“Joudah’s […] offers a stunning magnification of consciousness that undertakes the work suggested by the title: reembodying in the text—beautifully, painfully—what has been systematically removed.” 

“One of the most astounding moves Joudah makes in this collection is simply to contradict himself, to let the poem establish a reality and then take it away.”