Wrong Winds - by Ahmad Almallah (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Ahmad Almallah's third collection considers the impossible task of being a Palestinian in the world today.

When genocide is the question, can the answer be anything but wrong? In Wrong Winds, written during the first months of Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, Palestinian-American poet Ahmad Almallah converses with the screams echoing throughout the West. Traversing European cities, Almallah encounters the impossibility of being a Palestinian, left alone in a world full of sympathizers and enemies. Through a continuous unsettling of words and places, considering the broken voices of Western poetry (Eliot, Lorca, Celan among others), the poems in Wrong Winds discover the world again and form an impossible dialogue with the dead and dying.

Review Quotes

"Engaging, controlled, irrepressible."-- "Poetry Northwest"

"Wrong Winds is an epitome of poetic labor: a book that teaches the awesome responsibility of being fully human. Ahmad Almallah imagines a language for survival on a planet where people and morality are routinely and casually displaced, and offers pathways for us to come to terms with the world we are creating: a place that contains utmost beauty and unutterable hurt. Long after Palestine is free, these urgent poems will remain touchstones of what counters the degradation of the human spirit."-- "Anna Badkhen, author of Bright Unbearable Reality"

"A work of exquisite tenderness and pain, Wrong Winds is a truly remarkable collection. Almallah has distilled a fierce, aching, unsettling beauty from a year--a lifetime--of unimaginable trauma and grief. I was blown away by Almallah's Wrong Winds."--Dan Sheehan "Lit Hub"

"Ahmad Almallah's Wrong Winds faces the headwinds of American empire and genocide and refuses to look away. Poem by poem, line by line, Almallah leans into the wind and harvests a new kind of English, a poetry that wrestles with the Waste Lands in poetry and in the world. It is a language we need to learn, and soon, to awaken from this nightmare."-- "Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge"

"There aren't marks to frame how I like or read or grasp at these poems. I found myself crying at a table in my lostness. Dear Ahmad, you hit all these places at once, disjunctive illumination. English being cut and punned and diced and injected with rhyme, shadow and 'the Arabic tongue sticks out like a lizard.' War time is daytime even if you are not there. It's autumn. Aphoristic, cracked perfectly, someone (here) yelps to fill time, an impossible operation. Are we talking genocide now? It's history. The bodies are on your phone."-- "Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls"

"Almallah's writing is immensely relevant; we need his voice."--Naomi Shihab Nye

About the Author

Ahmad Almallah grew up in Bethlehem, Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia where he is an artist-in-residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His first book of poems, Bitter English, was published in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press in 2019. His second poetry collection, Border Wisdom, was published by Winter Editions in 2023. He received the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his sequence of poems "Recourse," won the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads Will Lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees, Cordite Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among others.