Gaza : the poem said its piece / Nasser Rabah ; translated from Arabic by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, and Khaled al-Hilli.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rabāḥ, Nāṣir, author.

Contributor:

Alcalay, Ammiel, translator.

Zghal, Emna, translator.

Al-Hilli, Khaled, translator.

Series:

Pocket poets ; 64.

Pocket poets ; 64

Language:

Arabic

English

Subjects (All):

Rabāḥ, Nāṣir--Translations into English.

Genre:

poetry.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

xiv, 176 pages ; 16 cm.

Place of Publication:

San Francisco, CA : City Lights Books, 2025]

Language Note:

Parallel text in Arabic and English.

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contains:

Container of: Rabāḥ, Nāṣir. Ghazzah. English

Container of: Rabāḥ, Nāṣir. Gaza. Arabic.

ISBN:

9780872869127

0872869121

OCLC:

1464286212