About this item
Highlights
- A bilingual anthology of poems from Palestine (2023-2024), You Must Live attests to existence in the face of suppression.Offering a portal into the realities of the Palestinian genocide, You Must Live is a bilingual anthology of recent poetry (2023-2024) from Gaza and the West Bank.
- About the Author: Sherah Bloor is a South African poet and scholar.
- 280 Pages
- Poetry, Anthologies (multiple authors)
Description
Book Synopsis
A bilingual anthology of poems from Palestine (2023-2024), You Must Live attests to existence in the face of suppression.Offering a portal into the realities of the Palestinian genocide, You Must Live is a bilingual anthology of recent poetry (2023-2024) from Gaza and the West Bank. Edited and translated from Arabic by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, You Must Live gathers the voices of poets currently living in Palestinian territory--some of whom have never left. Contributors write in the wake of current atrocities, from precarious situations, and from beyond what is endurable, with their lives at stake. Yet, You Must Live refuses to cast these poets as perpetual victims. Diverse voices and styles shine through--highly inventive, imaginative, knowledgeable, powerful, prayerful, theatrical, and even often humorous. There are love letters to the landscape, elegies for martyrs and homes, a lamentation from the bar, and proclamations for the future. "Is there safe passage? / Those who know these roads carry lanterns-- / our country's addresses are forever." Negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, You Must Live is a counter to the widespread dehumanization of Palenstinians, an urgent call to the global community.
About the Author
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. Sherah 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.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 award for creative writing in 2022. Abu Odeh is the recipient of several awards himself, which funded language, social activism, and literature study in Japan and the United States, and recognized outstanding contributions to research, such as a visiting scholar fellowship at the University of California, San Diego, and special recognition at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, from which Abu Odeh received a PhD in English literature and criticism in 2016.