A reflective work exploring grief, home, and artistic responsibility in the wake of the death of a father, medical difficulties in the family, and the ongoing US-Zionist genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, George Abraham’s second poetry collection exists in spectral kinship with queer ancestor Etel Adnan’s Arab Apocalypse and asks: how might grief serve as a tunnel into the liberated world?
Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration in the contemporary tradition anchored by Douglas Kearney, Anthony Cody, Tarik Dobbs.
George Abraham is a Palestinian-American poet and memoirist who was born on unceded Timucuan lands (Jacksonville, FL). They are the author of Birthright (2020), which won the Arab American Book Award. They are currently executive editor of Mizna and teach at Amherst College. Noor Hindi is a Palestinian-American poet. Her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. (Haymarket Books 2022), was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award.
Publication date: March 16, 2027
Praise for Birthright:
"Abraham writes, “i am always translating” – from the sizzling, flaring elements of Palestinian/universal displacement, immigration struggles, gender identity, body & memory as “fragmented countries” too, he has built a bold, brilliant book. Here is a love too wide for containment, illuminating layers of story – family & land, political yet passionately personal. In a lineage of many broken hearts & heart attacks, here is a heart too brave to mutter or flail." --Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People's Poet Laureate
"Abraham is a “scripter of breath” who moves fluidly across poetic forms and linguistic borders to mourn the plight of the Palestinian people and to praise their resilience. Listen to these songs of exile, diaspora, and longing. Navigate these maps of home, the body, and belonging. Birthright is a miraculous debut that “rewrites graves into sunrise” and crafts a poetics in which “every pronoun is a Free Palestine.”" -- Dr. Craig Santos Perez, Author of Habitat Threshold
"Birthright captures how politics penetrates our psyche and consciousness, but as the poems triumph through anguish, we are able to hold onto life. The journey of reading these words is also a universal one, bringing together conceptions of faith, love, family, settler-colonialism, violence, queerness, and the search for home. Never has poetry pierced through my heart, and touched my soul, as while reading Birthright for the first time." -- Dr. Sa'ed Atshan, Author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
"We begin: “let me be brief: by the end of this someone will be cursed” - sit up straight. Take this book, lay it flat: the spine will crack, a horizon waits, unfolding ahead of you. Walk into it. Never stop- Birthright will have changed you. “Another entirely new species will emerge over generations,” and is this collection not a new species of poetry? An adrenaline like the reader is hiking along a terrain both psychic and mythic before we reach the heart of it all: Palestine. The only thing Abraham is certain about. Birthright is prophetic and meta-aware. An essential honesty, a new kind of scripture." -- • Communal Blurb from Radius of Arab American Writers Fellows (Jess Rizkallah, Summer Farah, Noor Hindi, Hazem Fahmy, and Noor Al-Ahmadi)
Edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi