Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece

Like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Vallejo, Gazan poet Nasser Rabah embodies the magnificent possibilities of the human spirit and imagination under extreme conditions."Nasser Rabah is my favorite living poet in Palestine. The musicality of his lines could replace my heartbeats and I would feel more than alive."

—Mosab Abu Toha, author of Things You May Find Hidden In My EarBorn 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.