A love letter to Palestinian ancestors, their descendants, and their land, to all anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, to a history that will never be forgotten, and to a future in which there thrives a free, free Palestine.
Poetry has always served as a mode of resistance in Palestinian culture. In defiance of dispossession and decades of military siege, of a nakba that never ended, of historical and cultural obfuscation, of unrelenting violence and thousands of martyred people, the “power to narrate,” as Edward Said wrote, remains a necessary tool for self-determination. The poems collected here reclaim that power, bridging borders, languages, and generations to forge new conversations around resistance and liberation.
HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US is a battle-cry against the annihilation of a people. As Palestinian history remains haunted by exile, violence, and grief, so, too, are the poems in this anthology. And yet, editors George Abraham and Noor Hindi present these realities alongside other themes that are also true: queer and feminist perspectives, eco-poetry, meditations on love and time, and lineages of protest. This anthology dares to imagine a future beyond a nation-state for Palestinian people everywhere. Contributors include Refaat Alareer, Mahmoud Darwish, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mohammed El-Kurd, A.D. Lauren-Abunassar, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Hala Alyan, Fady Joudah, and Heba Abu Nada, and many other voices, both established and ascending.
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"A necessary anthology that burns with the ferocity of our people, who refuse to be erased. Urgent, unflinching, and gloriously alive, these poems remind us that to be Palestinian is to be a revolution."
—Randa Jarrar, author of Love Is an Ex-Country
“Shattered. Gutted. A gut-punch. Devastated. This broke me. I keep thinking about all the violent ways we describe how we feel in relation to art. It is woefully insufficient. This brilliant anthology did not wound me—did no harm, at all—if anything, its target is empire. These poems evoked in me the profound depths and range of human thinking and being encompassed in the words Palestine, Arab, love, and resistance; I will be forever grateful for this ferocious reminder of what it means to be alive.”
—Omar Sakr
“Heaven Looks Like Us is a book every classroom, every library, and every poet should celebrate. This necessary, urgent, and historic volume heralds a revolutionary poetics that remakes our necrotic world. In a time when Palestinian poets are silenced, beaten, tortured, and murdered for their truth telling, we have this liberatory chorus. This is poetry that makes us alive. This is a gift that dares to sing, dares to punch empire in the neck. I am grateful for its abundance, its grace, its refusal, its rage, its love, its imaginatory force, its regeneration. Let this book spur its readers to action—any and all actions—until we are all free.”
—Cathy Linh Che
“Poetry is the language of our people; It is the language of resistance. Heaven Looks Like Us offers hope, rage, resilience, memory and dreams. This book is the distillation of a Palestinian future, the taste of freedom… a glimpse of what is to come.”
—Hannah Moushabeck, author of Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine
Other books edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi
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DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.
by Noor Hindi