Description

A deeply moving poetry anthology exploring loss and survival by Palestinian writers living in Gaza and the West Bank

You Must Live brings together some of the most remarkable poets living and writing in Palestine today, from renowned international prize winners to talented emerging voices.

Composed over the past few years and gathered under desperate conditions, these poems, which appear in the original Arabic alongside English translations, are haunted by the long spectre of occupation, transforming laments for lost family, friends and places into a new vision of home. This is a poetry of witness and profound lyric imagination, attuned to the hidden beauty of the natural landscape, the music of sparrows under crowded skies, the electricity of complex desire, daring to conceive a dazzling future beyond dispossession and military siege.

You Must Live is the latest entry into the rich tradition of Palestinian poetry, negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, to provide a glimpse into the full interiority of Palestinian life.

‘A light beam of a collection in our dark hours…This is a landmark work, a center from which myriad new ways of thinking and being will flourish’ Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Publisher Review

A light beam of a collection in our dark hours. These poets managed the seemingly impossible: to build life-affirming yet daring linguistic nodes among the rubble of our world and our world’s imagination. This is a landmark work, a center from which myriad new ways of thinking and being will flourish — Ocean Vuong After years of massive sorrow and staggering dehumanization, this collection represents some of what has been lost–the neighborhoods; the exquisite loving consciousness; the proud and humble society; the triumphant bravery of precious human beings, families like yours and mine, who never stopped speaking and singing. This book should be required reading for every human being, especially those who have contributed to this disaster… a triumph after ongoing catastrophe — Naomi Shihab Nye Everyone with any humanity in the face of what is happening in Palestine should read this outstanding collection of poetry. These words emerging from among the ruins of Gaza and from the devastation in the West Bank have an electric immediacy, a burning anger, a sadness over what has been lost, and a graphic sense of time and place which, for some of these poets, is a recording of their last moments of life. It is impossible to read these poems and remain unmoved, impossible not to feel awe for their courage, and impossible not to share their mixed anger and sadness. Like the greatest war poetry, more than any picture, any video, any reportage can, the words of these poets convey the full horror of life under siege. — Rashid Khalidi You Must Live gathers testamentary art miraculously composed, in the midst of genocide, by poets who have borne unspeakable losses, the majority of whom are still within the debris fields of Gaza, survivors now on the precipice of famine, yet with pens in hand, in the ancient tradition of al-woquouf ala al-atlal, ‘standing in the ruins’ of the beloved. These poems are flares in a terrible darkness, here to show us the way back to our humanity — Carolyn Forche