‘To the Poet Who Knew the Storm Would Return’
“Dear Mahmoud, I write to you from Gaza, not as it was, nor even as it is, but as something in between—a city trapped in the silence of its own destruction.” – Alaa Alqaisi
Gaza
New Poetry after Darwish: ‘In Praise of What Is No Longer Ours’
The great twentieth-century poet Mahmoud Darwish was born on this day in 1941. Today, author-translator Alaa Alqaisi shares a letter to Darwish and a poem, after Darwish’s “In Praise of the High Shadow.”
Nasser Rabah’s ‘I Was Sand’
“I Was Sand” is set to appear in Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, which is forthcoming from City Lights next month.
Three Short Stories by Omar Hammash
Today, we share three short-short stories from Gaza, by author Omar Hammash.
New Writing from Gaza: Dunya al-Amal Ismail’s ‘The Thing’
Dunya al-Amal Ismail writes of nights in a tent on the beach in Gaza, when, “I lay down a front line of socks, mine and the kids’, filled with sea-sand, to defend my world contained within the tent.”
New Writing from Gaza: ‘Murky Vision, Bloodied Trees’
“The sentence’s shortfall is a wound that requires a crutch to prop it up, an absence in need of a wall brought tumbling down by the continuous bombing in Gaza, and countless buildings writhing from the cries.”
Valentine’s Day, During the Time of the War on Gaza
This work, by contributor Eman Al-Natour, imagines a Valentine’s Day hope: “Gaza will prosper, and will become beautiful again, with its houses, its gardens, its streets, and the hearts of its good people.”
Translating the Unseen: Gaza’s Sky and Anne Carson’s Vision
Translating the Unseen: Gaza’s Sky and Anne Carson’s Vision By Alaa Alqaisi It began with an email from Dr. James Heaney, a professor of English and Irish studies at Carlow […]
‘A Bird with Wings of Fire’: Nasir Abdullah
This essay, written by poet Nasir Abdullah in the fall of 2024, carves out the difficulties of being separated from family during genocide. A Bird with Wings of Fire By […]