Quiet orient riot / Nathalie Khankan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Khankan, Nathalie, 1972- author.

Contributor:

Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

68 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oakland, California : Omnidawn Publishing, 2020.

Summary:

"Quiet orient riot is a book about birth regimes and the politics of reproduction. Tracing the immaculate conception of a child through to her birth, it unspools the many ways that liturgical commands and an intense demographic anxiety affect a journey towards motherhood. What does it mean to bear a Palestinian child in the occupied Palestinian territory, enabled through contingent access to Israel's sophisticated fertility treatment infrastructure? How do you bear a body whose very creation is enabled by the pronatalist state, yet not recognized by it? How do you end up a national vessel? Are we all national vessels? While the journey is specific and localized, the larger questions that emerge from these poems are not: what kind of language may hold precarious life? What kind of poem may see a body held inside a body through emergency, diminishment and into resistance, bloom? Importantly, and over and above demographic and religious imperatives, these poems are concerned with other kinds of worship, bowing to a "chirpy printed sound," "what grows in the rubble," and "the capacity for happiness despite visual evidence." Where you look, there are water holes for the thirsty and a grove of "little justices.""-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The Bread is Flat in My Hand p. 15

Quiet Orient Riot p. 16

Still Torn Hill p. 17

A Dinosaur in the Field p. 18

A Young Arafat Glints in the Afternoon Sun p. 19

Demography I p. 20

We Consume Summer p. 21

A City was Close & Open p. 22

Human Rights Work p. 23

This Chirpy Printed Sound p. 25

The Surface I'm Gripping p. 26

Meanwhile Intervals p. 27

Demography II p. 28

Inside an Ovulation p. 29

Hebrew I Knew p. 30

A Name is Doing Hard Work p. 31

Liturgy I p. 32

Milk Vetch p. 33

Hebrew I Knew Too p. 34

It's a Living Situation p. 35

My Body is on the Way p. 36

Leading Follicles p. 37

This Land is Fabulous Priority p. 38

Streets that Narrow p. 39

They Lie Square & Altered p. 41

Let's Transfer Some Embryos p. 42

She Fed him Like a Baby Bird p. 43

Something you Cross Should be a River p. 44

At the Foot of Stars it's an Operation of Dust p. 45

To Say the Latitudes are Clearly p. 46

Liturgy II p. 47

Apple Cheeked in Your Chosen Body p. 48

I Wait for no One Now p. 49

Liturgy III p. 50

Kissed to be Weighed p. 51

Early & Already p. 52

The Way She Must've Learned to Write p. 53

The Capacity for Happiness Despite Visual Evidence is Great p. 54

A Human Count is Crucial p. 55

I Hear your Eyelashes Grow Bucket Girl p. 56

My Nerve Endings Are Material p. 57

Liturgy IV p. 58

Our Nearly Demographic Standing p. 59

That Summer Wasn't a Pleasant Person p. 60

Some Straight Lines are Generous p. 61

The Joy the Full p. 62

This Heart is Shape Shifting p. 63

The Figs You Held p. 64

Home Is Equal Parts Architectural & Guttural p. 65

Riot Cosmology p. 66

Birth is a Social Process & You are Something Stunning p. 67

They Said It Was Morning p. 68.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

ISBN:

9781632430830

1632430835

OCLC:

1145103159

Publisher Number:

99986102536