Out of Gaza: New Palestinian Poetry

At the beginning of the Fifth Gaza War, the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer defiantly promised that if the Israeli Defence Force attacked his house he would ‘throw my pen in the faces of the soldiers’. A few weeks later, Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike on the building.

Since the outbreak of the ‘Israel-Hamas war’ in October 2023, over 20k Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, almost all of them civilians. Four thousand children were killed in the first few weeks of the war. A third of all the houses have been destroyed, together with the water and electricity infrastructure, 300 schools, 26 hospitals and 88 mosques, turning Gaza into what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called a ‘graveyard’.

Out of Gaza brings together responses to the current crisis by Palestinian poets, including Naomi Shihab Nye, Farid Bitar, Deema Shehabi, Hala Alyan, Ali Abukhattab, Marwan Makhoul, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Mohammed Mousa, Dareen Tatour and Sara Saleh. These are poems of rubble and resilience, death and resistance; they speak about displacement, occupation, exile and bombardment. Angry with the world’s silence in the face of such tragedy, these poems bear witness to catastrophe and to the powerful determination to survive it.

This bilingual selection of poems by Tawfiq Zayyad will join Smokestack’s other poets from the Arab-speaking world – Amir Darwish (Syria), Chawki Abdelamir (Iraq), Anna Greki (Algeria) and Palestinian poets Ghassan Zaqtan, Reja-e Busailah and Farid Bitar, as well as Smokestack’s anthologies Poets and the Algerian War and A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry.

This book include poems by:

Refaat Alareer - If I must die

Hala Alyan - I don’t mean to hate the sparrows

Farid Bitar - Unexplained misery

Mohammed Mousa - Gaza children play in cemeteries

Hiba Abu Nada - Good night, Gaza

Naomi Shihab Nye - Green Shirt

Samah Sabawi - Questions the media should ask the people of Gaza

Sara M. Saleh - Say Free Palestine

Dareen Tatour - The child and the sea

Mosab Abu Toha - What is Home?

Reviews:

‘This volume of responses by fifteen Palestinian poets to the current crisis is necessary because it seems we still need to be told what it feels like to live under the constant threat of death, to live in a set of circumstances where your sovereignty is curtailed by the brutality of those who control the borders of your pseudo-state, and your personhood is equally curtailed by their bullets, gun butts and the bombing of your hospitals, mosques, churches and schools. The importance of the poems in this collection is that they do not flinch from using poetry as a means of raising the most uncomfortable questions – the ones we are supposed to avoid raising in polite company… an extraordinary collection… All of the poems here speak urgently of the existential experience of watching your homeland become a graveyard.’ -Nick Moss

‘profoundly sad and shocking.’ -Merryn Williams, London Grip

‘a living testimony and a memorial to the siege of Gaza… a major achievement.’ -Jim Aitken, Culture Matters

‘Out of Gaza demonstrates that even under the most oppressive conditions, poetry scoops out space for the imagination to breathe.’ -Critical Muslim

‘Smokestack Books, along with Alan Morrison and Atef Alshaer, have performed a vital service in bringing this anthology out so fast. Well worth all your attention and solidarity.’ -Morning Star

‘Poetry of unthinkable suffering. Out of Gaza demonstrates how even under the most oppressive conditions, poetry scoops out space for the imagination to breathe.’ -Critical Muslim