48Kg.
A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the midsts of unspeakable violence.
Translated from the Arabic by the poet,
with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami,
Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher
Reviews
One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line… What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it, and the result is truly astonishing ― Max Porter
The most horrifying, exquisite and staggering poems I have ever read ... This essential poetry of witness stares into the abyss, and we must look in the direction it looks -- Mícheál McCann ― The Irish Times
Written in Gaza between 2023 and 2025, Abu Akleen’s poems disassemble and painstakingly reassemble the body to interrogate injustice, death and grief. She creates a world where absurdity and reality, irony and humanity coexist―from the ice-cream man crying out ‘corpses for sale’ while noting that ‘no grave buys them,’ to death wanting to have a birthday party and picking ‘an arm the missile hadn’t shattered' .... Throughout 48Kg, Abu Akleen transforms witnessed details into fragile interpretations .... She notes that poetry gives ‘a form to feelings in order to understand them,’ and these heartbreaking and risk-taking poems protest with uncompromising clarity and tenderness against continuing atrocities -- Kit Fan ― The Guardian
Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza's most vivid and unstinting witnesses -- Claire Armistead ― The Guardian
Batool Abu Akleen has written the impossible thing―an unbelievably hard portrayal in poems of the daily attack on Gaza while living inside it―and her poems warp and play relentlessly with language in all its rare contrarity, its entire animal ancient, while sharing the inky humour and sweetness of her own new poet’s practice. For me, only Etel Adnan’s Arab Apocalypse can be compared to 48kg in its biting frankness and bravery; her words are coming straight from today. ― Eileen Myles
This collection by a brave extraordinarily gifted Palestinian woman, wise beyond her years, is a searing and urgent cry of the heart and conscience; a call to wake the world up to itself. Batool Abu Akleen’s fierce love for her country and people are thunderbolts of compassion and power, and the relevance of poetry is never stronger than in her luminous details of life and struggle. We live within a crisis of humanity, and we need her antidote; a shield against cruelty and silence in the disaster narratives of War. There must be poetry and consciousness after atrocity. You will weep and will weep and weep again. You will want to stop the world. ― Anne Waldman
These poems witness dispossession so profound, the poet longs even for certainty that her body will rest in a grave. This searing fact is the heart of 48Kg ― Anne Michaels
The poets of Palestine have become vital archivists. In 48Kg Batool Abu Akleen not only provides brute testimony of the Genocide committed by Israel against her people, but by her inventiveness and surreality, by the barbed humour and bitter irony of her voice, and the tender revelation and humane wisdom of her work, she defiantly gives voice and futurity to Palestinian life. She writes that she waits for death, ‘like a mother expecting her newborn’ telling us ‘I will scream / I will feel his head coming out of my body.’ No one should have to write these incredible, haunting lines, but everyone should read them. This is an extraordinary book of poetry ― Jack Underwood
Objects and emotions tangle brilliantly in these searing poems. It’s terrible that Abu Akleen has atrocities to write about, and how well she does it ― Caryl Churchill
Batool Abu Akleen’s 48kg is a gorgeous, desperate cry from a visionary young poet living amid apocalypse. This urgent collection, penned in Gaza under genocide, is at once grief stricken with the weight of Palestinian death and triumphant in its reclamation of language as a means of preserving Palestinian life. A beautiful, harrowing read ― Hannah Lilith Assadi
Batool Abu Akleen is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. At the age of fifteen, 2020, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes thereafter. Abu Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications, including ArabLit and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others. Her poem ‘Gunpowder’ was awarded third place in the 2025 London Magazine poetry prize, and her work was included in the July 2024 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, ‘Salam to Gaza.’ Abu Akleen was Modern Poetry in Translation’s 2024 ‘Poet / Translator in Residence.’ Her poetry has appeared in editors Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Alshaer’s anthology, Letters from Gaza (Penguin, 2025) and—alongside Nahil Mohan, Sondos Sabra and Ala’a Obaid—she is one of the four Gazan authors included in the collection Voices of Resistance (Comma Press, 2025).
