From the River to the Sea

This new collection by Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash was published in its original Arabic in the summer of 2024. The 24 poems are an intrepid literary journey into the genocide in Gaza, linking with Palestine’s long years of existential trauma, and documenting the universal human questions that so many are asking in today’s world. Living, as he has done since being born in Lebanon in 1972, in a diaspora crowded with fellow Palestinians, the poet shares with readers the depths of his turmoil and anguish, searing their attention to human pain from the first poem, “The Ruins”, with the image of a girl’s hand jutting up from cracks in the rubble, to the last, “The Scream” – the roaring voice of dust consuming all. In the poem, “Sitting in front of a TV screen, I watch the genocide”, the words he wants to say are torn from him, they’re not able to express what he wants to say; “language has become a torment”; senses are upturned, stupified, suspended, muffled, in a maze. How to possibly describe the deadly scenes, surreal visions, the revelations, nightmares, sounds, one after the other, except by reliving them? And thus the poet brings to his poems what one critic has called a “dictionary of war”, a lexicon that expresses a graphic poetic sensibility set in the midst of a war that is exterminating a people. Alongside the lexicon, a way of “seeing” anew the unspeakable horrors through the gazes, the glances, the closed, open, dead eyes of famished families, of fragmented little corpses, children whose gazes are frozen, stunned, dead, scornful, fixed, dazed. And each glance, each look, each stare is integral to the entirety of the tiny elements making up the lives and breaths of Palestine. This is a poetry collection so necessary for humanity today, in a perceptive and passionate translation by Robin Moger.

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