Darwish, Najwan: Exhausted on the Cross

Description

Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid(New York Review Books, paperback)

Publication Date: February 23, 2021

Publisher Marketing: A much-anticipated follow-up toNothing More to Lose, this is only the second poetry collection translated into English from a vital voice of the Arab world.

“We drag histories behind us,” Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish writes inExhausted on the Cross, “here / where there’s neither land / nor sky.” Darwish’s second major book in Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s brilliant translation follows the critically acclaimedNothing More to Lose. In pared-down lyrical lines, Darwish writes of what Chilean poet Ral Zurita in his foreword describes as “something immemorial, almost unspeakable”–a poetry driven by a “moral imperative” to be at once “a colossal record of violence and, at the same time, the no-less-colossal record of compassion.” Anchored between Haifa and Jerusalem, these poems cross histories, cultures, and geographies, taking us from the grime of modern-day Shatila and the opulence of medieval Baghdad to the gardens of Samarkand and the open-air prison of present-day Gaza. We join the Persian poet Hafez in the conquered city of Shiraz and converse with the Prophet Mohammad in Medina. Poem after liminal poem evokes the humor in the face of despair, the hope in the face of nightmare.