Three 2024 Collections of New Poetry with and from Gaza

Three new poetry collections gather work mostly written in the final months of 2023.

Out now, from the Publishers for Palestine collective, is Poems for Palestine, a free booklet of poetry, artwork, and resources for action, now available for both print and online dissemination. It includes poetry from Refaat Al-Areer, Fady Joudah, Hiba Abu Nada, Olivia Elias, Samer Abu Hawwash, Maya Murry, Ahlam Bsharat, Basman Aldirawi, and Ghassan Zaqtan. From the introduction:

“Though few of us could memorize an entire essay or story, poems come readily to the tongue and can be chanted or read aloud at gatherings, shared and re-shared on social media. They vibrate between us, move between languages, and connect memory to memory. Yet they are not only our shared sonic landscape, but also a visual one, with poetry written on stickers and placed beside bus seats and on lampposts; written on cardstock and held aloft during protests; penned elegantly for signs in windows. Poetry can be composed as quickly as a news story, and yet it resists the language of normalized oppression, searching for ways to help us see past the dulled passive voice of contemporary news coverage.”

Poems for Palestine is available free as an ebook at the Publishers for Palestine website, the ArabLit shopfront, and in limited print copies.

Out March 1 from SmokeStack Books, Out of Gaza is an anthology edited by Palestinian scholar-translator Atef Alshaer and Alan Morrison. The anthology, which Smokestack Books is calling “an emergency collection of poems” brings together work by fifteen Palestinian writers about the current moment, including poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, Hala Alyan, Farid Bitar, Ali Abukhattab, Marwan Makhoul, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Mohammed Mousa, Dareen Tatour and Sara Saleh. They add that a percentage of all sales will go to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

In his introduction, Alshaer writes, “Poetry at times of grave violence and danger as that experienced by the 2.3 million living in Gaza is something akin to the terrible impossible in all our dreams. But the higher calling of humanity makes poetry a duty, a duty to register pain and communion between and with the oppressed, with those whose very lives are under severe risk. In this case, poetry is a duty because it records the last stand of the soul as it stares death and destruction in the face, such keenness for the human voice to survive, and live long after humanity failed to preserve life and after all the cries for justice were not heeded.”

Out of Gaza is available for pre-order on Bookshop.

And finally, later in March, Fady Joudah’s extraordinary […] will be available from Milkweed in the US (March 5) and Outspoken Press in the UK (March 21). A collection of poems written mostly in the final months of 2023, these works re-invent the present, dissociating us from the worn-thin language of contemporary journalism and commentary and bringing us back down among the present to imagine it — and ourselves, and possibility — anew. The poetic voice is funny and tender and strange, and yet without looking away — or allowing us to look away — from the horrors of the present. You can read a handful of the poems online (many of which are also titled […]) before you pre-order. Here, on the New York Times; here, in The Nation.

[…] is available for pre-order directly from Milkweed and Outspoken Press, as well as on Bookshop and other outlets.