Rifqa

"May these poems challenge and awaken you. May they shake you into action. May they help you find the words for what you already know to be true... These words remind me that home is a series of shared memories, not brick and mortar. Home is where we go to remember and revisit who we've always been. Mohammed El-Kurd's poetry is a home returned to us."-Aja Monet, from the foreword"Rooted in Palestine and ranging across the world, these are poems that hurl themselves at the boundaries of what poems can do; lyrics that put a premium on anger, that reflect the serrated edges of living in the world today, that gift new and powerful phrases to the lexicon of liberation."-Ahdaf Soueif, author of Cairo: My City, Our Revolution"Rifqa is an absolute marvel, and El-Kurdis precisely the kind of poet- Palestinian or otherwise-we need right now:unafraid of the truth. The legacy of his grandmother, the eponymous Rifqa,flits across these poems, and with it comes wisdom, hope, and, most cruciallyof all, memory ... El-Kurd doesn't flinch from the violence and death that comeswith dispossession. But make no mistake. These are the poems of the defiantly,unapologetically, wholly alive." -Hala Alyan, author, The Arsonists' City "Rifqa is an admixture of the mostintimate violence-wounds that are as difficult to reveal as they are toheal-together with song and dance that beseech the sun to sustain this life andthese lands that ensure it. Rifqa El-Kurd lives in Mohammed and Mohammedbreathes life into us, scented with fire and jasmine flowers, so that we mayknow her, and the victory she embodied, too." -Noura Erekat, author, Justice for Some: Law and the Question ofPalestine "Rifqa is the collision of strengthand vulnerability. Earnest in its exploration of the grave realities in onecorner of the globe, it is a banging on the doors of the world. It illustratesthe wit that is necessary to weave together the tragic with the hopeful and thepainful with the joyful. Rifqa is a testament to overcoming fear in expression,a book that will resonate with you, one you hold and return to over and overagain." -Mariam Barghouti, journalist,researcher, activist, and commentator "Palestinians have long fought with poetry. Napoleon's army in Palestine wasdefeated by warrior poets. El-Kurd's words are part of this long and dazzlinglineage. An elegy to our ancestors, maternal, whose resistance we hope tohonor, each poem is a rock hurled at the occupier and the oppressor. Abeautiful and important book." -Randa Jarrar, author, Love Is an Ex-Country "Mohammed El-Kurd weaves the ancestors and Land into every breath of thesepoems. 'Every grandmother is a Jerusalem,' El-Kurd reminds us, injasmine-scented memory, in liminal space and punch line, in auto- andanti-biography. Here is poetry the whole of us can turn and return to-even ingrief, even in contradiction. Liberating itself from respectability & othercolonialist gazes weaponized against Palestinians, here is poetry insistent ontruths we've carried for generations. JERUSALEM IS OURS. El-Kurd writes thiswith its whole chest, knowing our lives-the whole & future of us-depend onit. -George Abraham, author, Birthright"El-Kurd's poems are attuned to language as a terrain of struggle.Refusing the myriad euphemisms that conceal and authorize Israel's ongoingviolence, he insists on a clarity that emplots each act in a field of history ...But if El-Kurd's poems witness the relentless reiterations of settler colonialviolence, they also document the rebuttals and tendernesses-Mahfoutha Ishtayyehchaining herself to a tree, "olive skin on olive skin," in the face of anIsraeli bulldozer; Rifqa El-Kurd welcoming her grandson home from school each daywith jasmine wrapped in Kleenex-seeds of other futures nestled within thepresent."-JewishCurrents"Paying powerful homage to his Palestinian people's lives andstruggles, while elegantly educating the reader, Mohammed El-Kurd's debutpoetry collection, Rifqa, is a symbolic masterpiece ... The poet understandspolitics is as much about emotion as it is logic, and his devastating way withwords lets him deploy this knowledge in full."-TheNew Arab"Like other Palestinian poets, from Fadwa Tuqan to Rashid Hossein toMahmoud Darwish, Kurd has a significant role to play in forging aninternational front against settler-colonialism and imperialism around theworld ... We should be grateful that this is Kurd's first book rather than hislast, and that we can look forward to many decades of poetic innovation fromthis extraordinarily multifaceted and politically engaged poet."-MiddleEast Eye'At24, Mohammed El-Kurd is already a poet of note. He is also a visual artist, andan activist like Rifqa. He has synthesized and overcome his American educationin poetry. He no longer feels like he has to hide in his words.'-The Markaz Review Read more...