Nasser Rabah

Broschiertes Buch

Gaza

The Poem Said Its Piece

Mitarbeit: Abu Toha, Mosab;Übersetzung: Alcalay, Ammiel; Zghal, Emna; al-Hilli, Khaled

Beschreibung

New York Times Best Poetry Books of the Year

Best Translated Book of the Year, Longlist, National Book Critics Circle Prize

World Literature Today Best Translated Books of the Year

Booklist Magazine's Editors' Choice

Words Without Borders Favorite Reads of the Year

Lit Hub's most Anticipated Poetry Books !

Like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Vallejo, Gazan poet Nasser Rabah embodies the magnificent possibilities of the human spirit and imagination under extreme conditions.

"Nasser Rabah is my favorite living poet in Palestine. The musicality of his lines could replace my heartbeats and I would feel more than alive."-Mosab Abu Toha, author of Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear

Born in Gaza in 1963, Rabah spent some of his formative years in Egypt, before returning to Gaza in his early twenties, where he has lived ever since. There, among the generations who built its neighborhoods and populate its villages, in a place of great natural beauty and vibrant cities, living under constant surveillance, military occupation, blockade, siege and regular attack, in a culture steeped in literary and spiritual tradition, Rabah developed his distinctively singular vision and poetics.

This is Rabah's first book in English translation. The poems include a selection from three of his published collections, along with new poems written after October 2023, during the full-scale Israeli assault on Gaza. Throughout, we find a combination of irreverence and fidelity to tradition, a sense of surrealism infusing the depiction of everyday incomprehensibilities, and an unsettling, delicate tenderness always on edge in an atmosphere of sensory inundation and emotional saturation. Rabah's poems can be raw and uninhibited by social or literary conventions, exploring and questioning one's relationship to divinity in absurd circumstances while confronting the sacred cows of his own society, along with the sometimes voyeuristic interest from those on the outside of it. His poetry constantly interrogates-sometimes playfully and sometimes in utter existential despair-the paradoxes and difficulties of expression and of writing itself. Nasser Rabah is a poet we have much to learn from.

This is a bi-lingual edition and includes the original versions in Arabic.

Autor

Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963. He got his BA in Agricultural Science in 1985, before going on to work as Director of the Communication Department in the Agriculture Ministry. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union and has published five collections of poetry, Running After Dead Gazelles (2003); One of Nobody (2011); Passersby with Light Clothes (2014); Water Thirsty for Water (2017); Eulogy for the Robin (2021), and two novels, Since approximately an hour (2018), and The Enclosure of the Gazelle (2024). Some of his poems have been translated into English, French and Hebrew. He lives in Gaza. Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar whose over 20 books include After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future, Islanders, andthe forthcoming CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books, andFollow the Person: Archival Encounters. Emna Zghal is a visual artist and professional interpreter with an acute sense of poetry in a number of languages. Khaled al-Hilli is a life-long student of the Arabic language and grammar and now professor of Arabic whose own life journey has immersed him in various Arabic milieus, from Iraqi to Lebanese and Levantine. Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear , published by City Lights, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. His new book of poems is Forest of Noise. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his "Letter from Gaza" columns for The New Yorker.

Produktdetails

• City Lights Pocket Poets Series 64
• Verlag: City Lights Publishers / Ingram Publisher ServicesBooks
• Bilingual ed
• Seitenzahl: 192
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. April 2025
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 154mm x 119mm x 11mm
• Gewicht: 153g
• ISBN-13: 9780872869127
• ISBN-10: 0872869121
• Artikelnr.: 71298337

Rezensionen

"In life and on the page, the Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah searches through rubble. In Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, a new translation of his work that includes writings from the onset of the current war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, he offers, 'There you are, giving a silent sermon over a heap / of the dead and move on, just like when you ask the grocer / for something, and move on.'"-Jennifer Wilson, The New Yorker

"Written as he endured the genocidal assault, Rabah's Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece resounds with gripping humanity, as his poems of love, the dead, and an accompanying fierce valuation of life evoke realities that often evade propaganda and the mass

media."-Danielle Shi, Zyzzyva

"Poet Nasser Rabah knows how to create an evocative image, with stunning constructions like this: 'We left our fingernails on the prison walls, growing in the dark like a cursed vine.' This collection begins by featuring some of Rabah's shorter work, eventually segueing into lengthier poems; they reveal that he's equally adept at making literary references (including to Mahmoud Darwish and Franz Kafka) and evoking the horrors of war."-Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

"Rabah's poems combine melancholy and erudition; classical grammar, diction, and vocabulary and breezy, colloquial storytelling; Quranic references and a modern sense of humor and horror. There's a formal informality to the verse, a constricted freeness."-Eman Quotah, The Markaz Review

"Rabah's lyrics are crucially vital reading for anyone living through wartime. . . . Displaced by ongoing violence within the Gaza Strip, Palestinian poet and novelist Rabah excavates poetic truths from a crushed collective unconscious."-Starred Review, Booklist

"Amid the onslaught, Rabah's poems retain their undiminished power to reach across time and space to address you, whether that 'you' refers to his countrymen or himself, the newly dead or the still living, or even the auditor of the book's final lines: 'O Gaza, accursed, beloved, deranged, oppressed, outcast, / enchanted, forgotten, mentioned a thousand times / in the Book of War, you're not the Goddess of the Dead, / nor is your book called Sorrow of the Country.'"-Christopher Spaide, Lit Hub

"Nasser Rabah's beautiful poems offer a generosity of close attention on a dignified life. A life lived alongside, against, and in opposition to the brutalities of violent occupation, but a life teeming with dignity and worthwhile affections, small and large.This, to say nothing of how the poems sing on a line level, with a rich music. 'I was sand gently grazed by grass woven through me' hums with a vivid clarity, such small and sweet songs run throughout this collection, which is a massive achievement."-Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

"Majestic, magnificent, searing, stunning-and as close to a reader as the heart-shaped cake broken in half for the children. Nasser Rabah is a poet so rich with life and visionary lyricism, he should never have to suffer such brutal injustices done to his people. With gratitude to the translators for their elegant renderings, may these poems travel far and find love everywhere."-Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Grace Notes

"Besieged by death and destruction, the poet performs his eternal task; saying the unsayable. Rabah digs deep, finds these rivulets of tears, and gives them wings. Rescued poems that rescue us from our own silence, reminding us that poetry is a refuge in this cruel world. Elegantly translated in a labor of love and solidarity."-Sinan Antoon, author of Postcards from the Underworld

"After reading this book, Adorno's famous dictum that writing poetry after a genocide could only be an act of barbarism comes off as lazy at best. Nasser Rabah's poems are alive with so much sadness, hallucinatory beauty, and harsh delight that it hurts to read them. But then everything is alive in these pages-clouds, trees, rivers, clothes, darkness, dreams, the night, language certainly, and poems without doubt.-Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

"Illuminating and lamenting the bewilderment of war and destruction, these poems expose what is shocking and what is banal: the dazzling presence of luck, bombed buildings which still stand, and 'beautiful doubt.' . . . Meanwhile, memories and old loves are forgotten in favor of surviving another day. While some may question how such grand scales of violence may be endured, Rabah carves space for the heart with an exquisite and excruciating attentiveness-even when it turns to stone, becomes 'a plaza of ash,' or 'flutters like a spinning coin.' The heart is present, always, everywhere, even destroyed, cold, and hardened; it works its way through the poet's fingers to write."-Liliana Torpey, Asymptote Journal

"Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece offers a poetics grounded in immersion rather than escape. Rabah's language does not attempt to lift the reader above the devastation but walks directly through it, attuned to the textures of brokenness and breath-and of life."-Alaa Alqaisi, The Avery Review