Israels Poetry Of Resistance

Noting that Israel's earliest responses to earth-shaking changes were cast in the powerfully expressive language of poetry, Hugh R. Page Jr. argues that the careful collection and preservation of these traditions was an act of resistance, a communal no to the forces of despair and a yes to the creative power of the Spirit. Further, Page argues, the power of these poems to craft and shape a future for a people who had suffered acute displacement and marginalization offers a rich spiritual repertoire for Africana peoples today, and for all who find themselves perennially outside the social or political mainstream.

A final collection of poetic works by the famed Jewish resistance fighter is comprised of pieces written in the last weeks of his life while he succumbed to cancer and are the poet's testament to a life lived with unflinching honesty and courage.

A collection of Palestinian poetry originally published in 1970 that resonates with liberation and civil rights struggles around the world. This updated edition for the current generation of activists features new poems translated by Edmund Ghareeb, an internationally recognized Lebanese-American scholar, and a new foreword by Dr. Greg Thomas. In 1971, in the wake of George Jackson’s killing by San Quentin prison guards, a poem entitled “Enemy of the Sun” was found among ninety-nine books in the revolutionary’s cell. The handwritten poem came to be circulated in Black Panther newspapers under Jackson’s name, assumed to be a vestige of his more than a decade long incarceration. But Jackson never wrote the poem; it was authored by the Palestinian poet Sameeh Al-Qassem and had been included in an anthology of the same title a year before Jackson’s death. Originally published by Drum & Spear, the publishing arm of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance links twelve poets working in a poetics of refusal and of hope. Bearing witness to decades of Zionist occupation, to a diaspora exiled in refugee camps and writers held captive in Israeli jails, the collection offers a means to an end: “as poetry, yes it sings—as bullets on a mission; it calls for change.” In each poem is a whole life—joy, love, beauty, rage, sorrow, suffering—and in each life is a record of resistance: the traces of a people who refuse to leave their homeland, who time and again alchemize grief into principled struggle. In the intertwined histories of this book, and in the unyielding political edge of the poems themselves, is a long story of solidarity between oppressed peoples: from Palestine to South Africa to Algeria to Vietnam to the United States.

The largest English-language collection to date from Israel’s finest poet Few poets have demonstrated as persuasively as Yehuda Amichai why poetry matters. One of the major poets of the twentieth century, Amichai created remarkably accessible poems, vivid in their evocation of the Israeli landscape and historical predicament, yet universally resonant. His are some of the most moving love poems written in any language in the past two generations—some exuberant, some powerfully erotic, many suffused with sadness over separation that casts its shadow on love. In a country torn by armed conflict, these poems poignantly assert the preciousness of private experience, cherished under the repeated threats of violence and death. Amichai’s poetry has attracted a variety of gifted English translators on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1960s to the present. Assembled by the award-winning Hebrew scholar and translator Robert Alter, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai is by far the largest selection of the master poet’s work to appear in English, gathering the best of the existing translations as well as offering English versions of many previously untranslated poems. With this collection, Amichai’s vital poetic voice is now available to English readers as it never has been before.

Winner of the 2011 PEN Translation Prize A collection of autobiographical essays by one of the greatest poets to come from Palestine. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in the roots and ramifications of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. Muhawi's own prose and meticulous footnotes are impeccable. An inspired and scholarly piece of research. —Words Without Borders “Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance,” writes Mahmoud Darwish. In these probing essays, Darwish, a voice of the Palestinian people and one of the most transcendent poets of his generation, interrogates the experience of occupation and the meaning of liberation. Calling upon myth, memory, and language, these essays delve into the poet’s experience of house arrest, his encounters with Israeli interrogators, and the periods he spent in prison. Meditative, lyrical, and rhythmic—Darwish gives absence a vital presence in these linked essays. Journal is a moving and intimate account of the loss of homeland and, for many, of life inside the porous walls of occupation—no ordinary grief.

My Sweet Dream / My Living Nightmare: Adobe Walls

Rifqa is Mohammed El-Kurd’s debut collection of poetry, written in the tradition of Ghassan Kanafani’s Palestinian Resistance Literature. The book narrates the author’s own experience of dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah--an infamous neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestine, whose population of refugees continues to live on the brink of homelessness at the hands of the Israeli government and US-based settler organizations. The book, named after the author’s late grandmother who was forced to flee from Haifa upon the genocidal establishment of Israel, makes the observation that home takeovers and demolitions across historical Palestine are not reminiscent of 1948 Nakba, but are in fact a continuation of it: a legalized, ideologically-driven practice of ethnic cleansing.