The Best-Selling Novelist Kaveh Akbar Leans Into His Poetic Roots

Kaveh Akbar may be best known for his début novel, “Martyr!” (a finalist for the National Book Award), but he began his career as a poet. Recently, he joined us to recommend four collections by Palestinian writers, each of which grapples with the status of being Palestinian in the world—but also with timeless themes such as love, sex, motherhood, and nature. His remarks have been edited and condensed.

Something About Living

by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

This might be my most gifted book of 2024. I think that a lot of writing by writers who belong to marginalized communities is read first for its social utility, and only secondly for its formal vision, but this is such a remarkable book for its relationship to received forms and its syntactical agility. Khalaf Tuffaha writes about her children and her husband and her love. There’s a moment in it where she says, “I have no idea what hope is, but our people have taught me a million ways to love,” and that love feels like the center of the atom here.

The Moon That Turns You Back

by Hala Alyan

Hala is a clinical psychologist—honestly, I always find it obnoxious when people are good at more than one thing. [Laughs.] Hala is a Palestinian American writer, and the book addresses that, but it also orbits many other places and ideas. This is a book that deals with fertility treatments and the feelings associated with desiring a child but not being able to conceive one. It’s a book about addiction—there’s a beautiful poem that I love, called “Relapse Dream Ending with My Grandmother’s Hands,” which is just extraordinary. The book feels various in the way that living feels various—it’s really faithful to the convergence of different things in your brain in a way that I find very moving.

No One Will Know You Tomorrow

by Najwan Darwish

Darwish is a really important Palestinian poet, editor, and journalist, and this book is a selection of the past decade of his poetry. That means that it travels the gamut. There are storytelling poems, where he creates myths and little miniature fables, almost like snow globes that you can shake and hold up to the light. There are dream visions about a homeland from which he has long been exiled. There are also love poems.

The translator, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, has done an incredible job. The lines feel idiomatic—sometimes in translations there’s a kind of starchiness or stiffness to the language, but this feels utterly natural. One of my favorite moments in it reads, “this earth: the remains of strangers naturalized by death.” That idea, “naturalized by death”—it just feels crystalline and irreducible, and I’m also struck by how it implies the existence of a nationhood to which we can all belong, where the only border is mortality.

[…]

by Fady Joudah

A lot can be said about the title of this book, which, I think, points to the ongoing quality of the occupation of Palestine and the world’s ambivalence about it. As I was reading about the ceasefire, I remembered a long poem of his called “Dedication,” which comes toward the end of the book. And it runs, in part:

To those who will be killed on the last day of the war. To those who will be killed on the first day after the war ends. To those who succumb in the humanitarian window of horror. An hour before the pause, a minute after.

One of the things that I love about “[…]” is its rage, which feels like it’s born of seeing harm clearly. Fady is a physician who has done a lot of work with Doctors Without Borders, both in Palestine and elsewhere, and has witnessed the direct and indirect damage of war up close. The fact that his book doesn’t forget the body also means that the poet himself is embodied, experiencing desire, experiencing sensuality. I find that really affecting, too, because it’s a way of saying there are stakes. The people you read about become more than abstract casualty statistics. These are people like me, whose hearts could fit in my chest, whose eyes could fit in my eye sockets, who were desirous of a lover’s touch.