You Must Live - by Sherah Bloor & Tayseer Abu Odeh (Paperback)

About the Book

Parallel text in Arabic and English on facing pages

Book Synopsis

A bilingual anthology of poems from Palestine (2023-2024), You Must Live attests to existence in the face of suppression.

Bearing witness to the realities of the Palestinian genocide, You Must Live is a bilingual anthology of recent poetry from Gaza and the West Bank. Translated from Arabic and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, this collection gathers the voices of poets currently living in Palestinian territory, most of whom have never left. Yet the poems in You Must Live refuse to cast their speakers as perpetual victims. Diverse voices and styles shine throughout--powerful, prayerful, theatrical, and even humorous--as poets write love letters to the landscape, elegies for martyrs and homes, and proclamations for the future. Negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, You Must Live sounds as an urgent call to the global community.

Review Quotes

Praise for You Must Live

"A light beam of a collection in our dark hours. These poets managed the seemingly impossible: to build life-affirming yet daring linguistic nodes among the rubble of our world and our world's imagination. This is a landmark work, a center from which myriad new ways of thinking and being will flourish."--Ocean Vuong

"Bowing down. In grief and in gratitude. I feel overwhelmed with respect and thanks for the enormous labors of Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, as well as Copper Canyon Press, [in] creating this comprehensive gathering of crucial Gazan and West Bank voices, and writing such an eloquent contextual introduction. After years of massive sorrow and staggering dehumanization, this collection represents some of what has been lost--the neighborhoods; the exquisite loving consciousness; the proud and humble society; the triumphant bravery of precious human beings, families like yours and mine, who never stopped speaking and singing. Over here in the United States, we sorrow, we weep, we feel fury at the role our own country has chosen in this disaster, and understand little of what human beings do to one another. But this we can hopefully all understand--the honoring of other people's stories and lives. Here are their stanzas which served as oars to help them get through the worst days any of us can even imagine. This book should be required reading for every human being, especially those who have contributed to this disaster. It testifies to Gazan beauty and love. And hopefully it will also find the honorable young students worldwide who have taken it upon themselves to advocate for justice and equality and the end of occupation and oppression. This book is a triumph after ongoing catastrophe."--Naomi Shihab Nye

"Everyone with any humanity in the face of what is happening in Palestine should read this outstanding collection of poetry. These words emerging from among the ruins of Gaza and from the devastation in the West Bank have an electric immediacy, a burning anger, a sadness over what has been lost, and a graphic sense of time and place which, for some of these poets, is a recording of their last moments of life. It is impossible to read these poems and remain unmoved, impossible not to feel awe for their courage, and impossible not to share their mixed anger and sadness. Like the greatest war poetry, more than any picture, any video, any reportage can, the words of these poets convey the full horror of life under siege. 'One day, everyone will have always been against this, ' Omar El Akkad wrote. Whenever that day comes, this collection will stand as a shining memorial to poets who wrote in unimaginable conditions during the dark time we are living in, when not enough of us were against it to stop it."--Rashid Khalidi

"You Must Live gathers testamentary art miraculously composed, in the midst of genocide, by poets who have borne unspeakable losses, the majority of whom are still within the debris fields of Gaza, survivors now on the precipice of famine, yet with pens in hand, in the ancient tradition of wuquf 'ala al-atlal, 'standing in the ruins' of the beloved. This is Gaza, as reported by the poets who 'sing [war] to sleep' in qasidas and shorter odes, prose poems and meditations, in the sea-rhythms of their forebears, in the hope to 'convince the dead they are still alive' among a people 'sleeping in tents. / More fragile than clouds.' These poems are flares in a terrible darkness, here to show us the way back to our humanity.""--Carolyn Forché

"Is great poetry still possible in the twenty-first century? Open this book and read Khaled Juma's 'The Gravedigger, ' written in Gaza in 2024--and you will have your answer, which is yes. This book is filled with poems of utter urgency, poems that give us wisdom, in the midst of devastation, despite devastation: 'The children of the al-Bakr family. / I can't find them running in the streets. / I can't find them on Gaza's beach. / Only here they are still running, inside their photograph, ' writes Yahya Ashour. These poems stun--not just because they speak out of the place that has been bombed-out by the weapons our country has supplied while we watched--but because the voices that rise up in these words are incredibly memorable and talented. So much love in these elegies, so much power. My awe and gratitude especially goes to the translators for these vivid and compelling English versions. Once upon a time in the mid-twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova thought that poets talk to each other across time and geography, even if they don't know each other's languages. She called this 'correspondences in the air.' This book is full of such correspondences, the echoing makes history's crimes even more horrific to us, and the poetic gesture even more clarifying."--Ilya Kaminsky

"Featuring more than 30 poets living in Gaza and the West Bank, with work written in the last few years, these poems testify to the resilience of the artists, and the role that poetry still has to give voice and bear witness in times of crisis."--The Guardian, "Best Recent Poetry"

"Erudite translator-editors Abu Odeh and Bloor have created a timely and important bilingual anthology of recent poems by 30 Palestinian poets living in Gaza and the West Bank. These potent poems are shattering and sublime, intimate and communal. . . . With war, deprivation, and suffering in Gaza and violence and injustice in the West Bank, dire horrors mostly hidden from the world, poets as courageous witnesses are desperately needed. Read and share these testaments to the fact that neither bloodshed or even death can extinguish truth and poetry."--Raúl Niño, Booklist STARRED REVIEW

"Each poem in You Must Live (Copper Canyon, 2025) is accompanied by the year and place of its composition. Forty-three times, in small, faint italics: Gaza, 2024. Sometimes the West Bank. Sometimes a few years before that. It's a convention you see most often in editions of writers long dead, when scattered drafts are painstakingly reassembled in a variorum edition. Or in collections of letters, when you peer over the shoulders of the dead as they tell each other how each day was with them. In the pages of this anthology, as chronological time eddies and ruptures around trauma, as scenes of actual deprivation are braided with sensuously rendered memory and imagination, and as poets address those dead and those about to be with equal loving plainness, the heartbreak is, momentarily, lightened; the murdered turn to us, and open their eyes, before falling back to sleep."--Noah Warren, Kismet

"You Must Live: New Poetry From Palestine is both a prayer and an order: that the rich polyphony of voices continue to live in face of ongoing genocide. Bringing together works from contemporary poets currently living in Palestine (with the exception of Yahya Ashour, who was stranded in Michigan when the war began), the poems in this collection vibrate with present urgency, acting as a testimony not only to the brutality of the Israeli invasion, but the vibrancy of the fractured literary community in Gaza."--Christopher Alexander, Asymptote

"You Must Live embodies this duality of power and openness, making room for grief and sorrow, alongside nostalgia, memories, and dreams of a gentler future."--Amira Hayat, Poetry Wales

"That we have these poems at all is a testament to the tenacity of the editors and the courage of the poets. . . . These poets, over and over again, insist on making it possible for those of us 'living outside of Gaza' to imagine their grief, the repression and injustice and death they are living with constantly, to be moved by it, to refuse to accept any of this as 'routine.'"--W.D. Ehrhart, Current Affairs

"To date, many English-language anthologies have necessarily focused on the diaspora -- on poems written at a distance from the daily annihilation of space and identity. You Must Live shifts that gravity, because its center is not exile; it is presence. It gives us a glimpse of what it means to write while still inside the ruin and chaos."--Shole Wolpé, The Markaz Review

About the Author

Tayseer Abu Odeh is a Palestinian-Jordanian writer and translator. Among other outlets, his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Arab Studies Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Harvard Divinity School's Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image, and Sound. He serves as an international advisor on the editorial board of The Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies and as a judge for writing competitions, including the Jubilee Institute's 2022 award for creative writing. Abu Odeh is the recipient of several awards that have funded language, social activism, and literature study in Japan and the United States. He has also received a visiting scholar fellowship at the University of California, San Diego, and recognition for his outstanding contributions to research at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, from which Abu Odeh received a PhD in English literature and criticism in 2016.

Sherah Bloor is a South African poet and scholar. Her first poetry collection, The Gathering, an epic in cantos, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in fall 2026. She is currently working on a second collection, tentatively titled Archives of the Free World. Having studied philosophy and social theory in Australia, she is completing a doctorate at Harvard University in philosophy of religion on the medical history of the mystical and poetic imagination. Bloor is also the editor-in-chief of Harvard Divinity School's literary and arts journal, Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image, and Sound (Harvard University Press). Her own poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Dialogist, Lana Turner, and Paperbark, among other magazines.