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    Alight
    Alight
    Alight
    Ebook81 pages47 minutes

    Alight

    By Fady Joudah

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    About this ebook

    The poems in Alight alternate between the estranging familial and strangely familiar, between burning and illumination. As father, husband, and physician, Fady Joudah gives children and vulnerable others voice in this hauntingly lyrical collection, where, with quiet ferociousness, one’s self can be reclaimed from suffering’s grip over mind and spirit.

    Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, translator, and physician of internal medicine. He received his medical training from the Medical College of Georgia and University of Texas, and served with Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Louise Glück. In 2010 he received a PEN translation award for his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateJul 3, 2013
    ISBN9781619321144
    Alight
    Author

    Fady Joudah

    Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

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      Book preview

      Alight - Fady Joudah

      Tenor

      To break with the past

      Or break it with the past

      The enormous car-packed

      Parking lot flashes like a frozen body

      Of water a paparazzi sea

      After takeoff

      And because the pigeons laid eggs and could fly

      Because the kittens could survive

      Under the rubble wrapped

      In shirts of the dead

      And the half-empty school benches

      Where each boy sits next

      To his absence and holds him

      In the space between two palms

      Pressed to a face/

      This world this hospice

      After

      Over treasure and land some texts will say it had

      Little to do with slavery or the newly

      Discovered yellow planet

      Few men watched the glaciers recede

      From shuttles they had built

      During the hemorrhage years

      When they’d gathered all the genes down from the ledges

      I’ll be a fig or a sycamore tree

      Or without hands

      By then doctors and poets

      Would have found a cure for prayer

      *

      Or have you shoved the door shut

      In the face of the dark?

      Have you body and light the trap

      Of retribution doing unto you

      What it does to others? You protest

      In the streets and papers and I leave

      For a faraway land

      Where with pill and scalpel

      And a distant reckoning

      If he should lick his lips

      Or clench his fist I shall find his second left toe

      Infected puffy

      From a bump

      I’ll lance it and squeeze

      Out the pus and offer

      Him an antibiotic

      I can’t refuse therefore I am

      *

      The first time I saw you it was hot I was fed up

      The second time your wife gave birth to a macerated boy

      I had nothing to tell you

      About letting go of the dying

      In the morning you were gone

      Had carried your father back to your house

      His cracked skull

      I didn’t know that was your wife

      When I raised my voice

      To those who were praying

      From behind the wall to keep it down

      I was trying to listen to your baby’s heartbeat

      With a gadget a century old

      *

      Anemic

      From so much loss giving birth

      If you give blood in the desert you won’t

      Get it back not your iron pills or magic hat

      I put your thin

      Hemoglobin up to the light and called out

      To the donors Donors

      If

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