Fady Joudah

This is not a review, this is not a blurb: Bhanu Kapil on [...] by Fady Joudah /  by Out Spoken

This is not a review or a blurb: Some words in support of [...] by Fady Joudah

Who do petals belong to?  How are they named? Imagine petals that look away, that don't socialize in the way you expect a petal to love or mourn or listen. Imagine petals organzing to form a bridge. To where?  From what?  In the logic of Fady Joudah's sequence, the petals "kept my toes warm," but only after they "ate the worms." So, what is this?  It's what you think it is. What eats what's eating your dead becomes silk, cotton, wool or "gauze." It becomes a covering, a woven cloth.  Who weaves it?  The petals?  The petals coat or warm a posture so exposed that it both precedes and out-dates life.  Suddenly, the voice of this poem is the voice you never expected or wanted to hear in this context. It's the voice of the one who will never return in their given form, or arrive. Are the petals performing, without performing anything, the construction of a shroud? In these poems that can't be aftermath (in conditions that do not end), the beloved's "open heart" is also a face with "two ears, two eyes. One set for breath, one for blood."  I'm so moved by the potential of a wound to become a face, to exert a possibility beyond the recognition that accompanies it, always, in the imaginations of others. But also: "If you read this and can hear me," writes Joudah, what's that smell?" Is this an interview?  And if this is an interview, then the poet is archiving what we are never meant to know, just as the messages of our internal organs are dormant until something is wrong. Only then do we experience an impossible sensation. On page 77 of this collection, a collection written by a doctor, a translator of the poems of Mahmoud Darwish (among others), a poet who has lost over a hundred members of his family in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, a collection written in one long and broken sitting in the Autumn of 2023, comes the "Dedication," a poem or beyond-poem that changes what feels possible for a poem, or book of poems, in the current era. Is this an era? No, once more, as Joudah reminds us, eras time out. This collection is not a primordial art work. Instead, it is written in the present and in the future, simultanously. Joudah dedicates his book: "To those who will be killed on the last day of  the war. To those who will be killed on the first day after the war ends. To those who succumb in the humanitarian window of horror." Reading these words is to stop reading. To continue reading in another way. 

"I am not your translator." -- Fady Joudah.

This is not a review, and it's not a blurb. 

[…]

Bhanu Kapil, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

With thanks to Bhanu for providing these liberated and liberating words of support.

[…] by Fady Joudah is published on 21 March 2024 and is available for pre-order here.

Bhanu Kapil is the author of six books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006; forthcoming in a new edition from Kelsey Street Press, 2022), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2016), and How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020).  How To Wash A Heart was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice. Kapil is the recipient of a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry from Yale University, and is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Announcing our Out-Spoken Press 2024 List: Titles from Fady Joudah, Azad Ashim Sharma, Jay Gao, Rebecca McCutcheon, Rojbîn Arjen Yigit & Juana Adcock /  by Out Spoken

We are pleased to share with you our 2024 poetry list, including an urgent and timely collection of poems by prominent Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah — […], forthcoming 21 March 2024 — and the third poetry collection by Azad Ashim Sharma — Boiled Owls, forthcoming 18 April 2024 — alongside titles by Jay Gao, Juana Adcock, Rebecca McCutcheon and Rojbîn Arjen Yigit.

Out-Spoken Press Editor Anthony Anaxagorou says:

“With all the horrors taking place at the moment, the poets in our forthcoming list offer insight, artfulness and integrity, at a time when so many of us may feel withdrawn and hopeless. From war, displacement, climate breakdown and psychological trauma, these particular books reflect on what it means to not only be alive in the world, but to survive it.”
— Anthony Anaxagorou

Fady Joudah’s [...] is  a raw, weighted account engaging largely with the diasporic experience as a Palestinian American, and will be published in March. Joudah is a prominent Palestinian American physician and poet, and a winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. On the title of [...] Joudah says: “I wrote the bulk of this collection between October and December of 2023. I could not imagine a title for the book or for most of its poems in a time of extermination. The text of the poems already says enough. The text also betrays a necessary silence. And yet the silence in the book is the silence that the reader, listener, recipient should practice. In some moments I share this silence with them, and they with me. In many moments, however, the silence is solely their task. The ellipsis in brackets highlight the space in which a Palestinian speaks and others listen.”

Editor Anaxagorou acquired UK and Irish rights to [...] from Tanya McKinnon of McKinnon Literary. North American rights were acquired by Milkweed Editions.

 

Azad Ashim Sharma’s third collection, Boiled Owls — described by Bhanu Kapil as “a stunning rendition of “half imaginary geography,”’ — demystifies drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, and anxiety whilst thinking through their relation to capitalism and its resistance, the family, and a writer’s compulsion to write, and will be published in April.

Anaxagorou acquired UK and Irish rights to Boiled Owls from Suresh Ariaratnam at Spring Sultan.

The Press has acquired rights to Juana Adcock’s debut collection, I Sugar The Bones, forthcoming October 2024. UK and Irish rights acquired by Anaxagorou directly from the author.

Anaxagorou’s 2024 list is completed by a new title, Bark, Archive, Splinter, by award-winning poet Jay Gao, and debuts by Rebecca McCutcheon and Rojbîn Arjen Yigit.