This review originally appeared on Working Knowledge, which you can subscribe to via Substack, and appears here as part of our Women in Translation Month series.
On Batool Abu Akleen’s ’48kg’
By Hilary Plum
Batool Abu Akleen’s debut collection of poetry arrives from her home in Gaza in the form of a striking daffodil-yellow Arabic/English edition, beautifully published by Tenement Press in the UK. It’s strange to read a book without knowing if the author has been able to get hold of a copy. Abu Akleen composes in Arabic; the translations here are by the poet in collaboration with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher, in what reads as a fluid process resulting in a clear cohesive voice. A note informs the reader that these poems were written between 2023 and 2025—thus this book emerges from amid the escalating genocide Israel is perpetrating in Palestine even as I draft this review. In its structure the book envisions the poet’s bodily disassembly, deprivation, and annihilation: the 48kg of the poet’s body count down kilo by kilo, poem by poem, approaching a vision of the self as flesh scattered and gathered in blue plastic bags, indistinguishable from the corpses of others. “In this book, I am collecting the parts of myself I have found,” the poet tells us, “in case there isn’t anyone there to do so if I am killed.”
Abu Akleen is young, yet her book exceptionally renders a preternatural intimacy with death. Before we speak of the poems we are forced to speak of the famine in Gaza that monstrously threatens to enact this book’s conceit: the body’s diminishment, its vanishing. It’s obscene that the poets of Gaza—a vital site of literature extending deeply into history and wide in diaspora, exile—may now so specifically predict (like Refaat Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die,” anthem of protests here in the US) their own deaths. Abu Akleen has a YouTube channel where she documents her daily life, centered on her writing, reading, translating, library and bookstore finds, university studies, sunsets, love of notebooks, toll of repeated evacuations, sounds of the drones, flights, strikes. Her latest video is titled “How I work while I am dying of hunger.”
I tend to speak of the poem as a gathering place, where readers and writers may meet across time, across distance, together contesting the limits of language and imagination. The poem invites itself into existence, and you the reader respond to that invitation. In the case of this book, the distance to cross as you step into the poem may (should) feel extreme. The vivid lyric work of this book—the intimate, self-assured voice we find in these pages, its humor, its pointed observation—arrives under pressure of death itself, ultimate limit. The gathering our poet hosts is shadowed, blockaded, by the real figures of genocide—the missiles and Apache helicopters that appear in these poems, and then those who today, hour by hour, block the entry of aid trucks into Gaza. In that number the reader in English, paying her taxes, is implicated. The solution to the famine, I heard an analyst say in an interview this morning, is within “spitting distance” of Gaza. The trucks are right there. These killers deserve no place in the poem but they too keep gathering, a horror of darkness through which the brightness of this book is forced to break. And as for me—in responding the reader is responsible to her own position—like most readers of this work in its English translation, I’ve been witnessing the nightmare of what the US and Israel are committing in Palestine from a safe distance, my body no target, my efforts to stop this violence yielding nothing. In being published, bound and distributed, cared for, a poem may come to outlast such dark work. But hundreds of thousands of readers and writers will not. What is the work of reading and writing now? I can’t answer that question these days, but this poet is asking it too, with her own force, her distinct voice: here we may meet.
The poet lets us glimpse the depths of this darkness as she knows it, which won’t stop reemerging, terribly even from within the self:
my mind can only make of words a clear shadow in the light
a clear light in the shadow
but shadow & light are just a mirage.
This is how weak I am.
Damn my weakness, O God
damn my mind, O God.
Amid genocide Abu Akleen knows her voice and her poetics, a precise stripped-down surrealism that makes these short potent poems into dynamos engaging mortality itself: “I cannot meet you: I have a date with a death that / never comes.” Her poems work with a central vocabulary of imagery, abstracted yet treated concretely: heart, hand, sky, lake, cloud, flesh, skin, grief, fear, flame, hell. The speaker moves deftly through different positions and autobiography is swift and concentrated. There may be a clear concrete scene—drinking coffee amid shelling; your father’s “striped shirt [being] worn by a stranger”; “a grandmother’s shivery hand found on the neighbours’ roof”—or there may be a fable covering over an unspeakable reality, where figurative and literal forms of suffering merge, and a metaphor may grow unspeakably heavy in your arms.
The collection is arranged to commandingly establish a pattern then break it through escalation, expansion, redoubling of absence. In the first half of the book, the poems tend to move toward a vanishing or potential extinguishing of the self. Later, the self begins instead to be displaced or exchanged, by the suffering of a family member, a severed body part, an object, a myth—the self negated, absented from itself into an otherness that is also absented. The poet seems to be expanding, moving lightly beyond herself, into a multiplicity that is always death’s: “we’ll be so light / they’ll just cross off the word ‘camp’ and write / ‘cemetery’.” Death takes the least bearable forms—your own newborn, as in one poem—and then vanishes when he might be of use: “If you don’t kill grief O death / then who will?”
This is a book written in the face of death’s invasion and occupation of daily life, achieved by a poet who has only recently left childhood herself. She has kept a foot on the threshold, I think; she can still feel the fullness of childhood’s dreams and needs, and this is part of her wisdom. We can feel this writer’s power and even pleasure in invention—landing on a startling image, then alighting again—yet she also insists on directness, on looking right at hell and speaking plainly: “I want a grave / I don’t want my corpse to be / decomposing in the middle of the street.” In her opening note Abu Akleen writes: “This book came after months of my refusing to write anything, believing that poetry wouldn’t change the world.” Conversations with friends persuaded her, she says, of the value of the work, not even for the world but for herself. We see the devastation of this insight in moments such as, “I was crying over you / & lamenting you in poems casual as your death,” at the end of one poem (a poem numbered as 22kg.—not, you might notice, a survivable weight). This line stunned me. Yes, poems, even when they take years to know how to write, are casual. Even when they travel through history toward us, that may be their limit, their charge. They may mark a cloud that passes like it was stolen, the voice of a child echoing, coffee brewing, the moment someone learned there would be no ceasefire. Abu Akleen knows the urgency and mystery and futility and transformation of this elusive endless work. The generosity of her poetic labor feels impossible, but it’s real, right there on the page, as if casually, attesting to the value—the specific weight—of everything before death arrives.
Also:
Contribute to a GoFundMe for Batool Abu Akleen. And the book is here.
Hilary Plum is a writer, editor, and teacher. Subscribe to her “Working Knowledge” here.