Out of Gaza – New Palestinian Poetry
Edited by Alan Morrison and Atef Alshaer, Smokestack Books, £9.99

THIS anthology of 14 Palestinian poets is worth the read for its introduction alone. Atef Alshaer, a senior lecturer at University of Westminster, edited the collection along with Alan Morrison, and they ask the obvious question: how can Palestinians write poetry in the face of the Gaza genocide? Their answer: “A duty, because it records the last stand of the soul as it stares death and destruction in the face.”

Two of the anthology poets have been murdered. Rafaat Alareer a leading Gazan poet, writer, professor, and activist, was specifically targeted in December 2023 for a sarcastic online comment about the wholly invented October 7 atrocity of “an Israeli baby burned alive in an oven.” 

His poem If I Should Die has gone round the world: you can find it read online by the Scottish actor Brian Cox. It was addressed to his daughter, who was also murdered a matter of weeks later with her child. Hiba Abu Nada was a poet and novelist, from a family displaced to Saudi Arabia by the 1947 Nakba, whose novel won a 2017 international prize. She died in Khan Younis in an  Israeli airstrike on October 20 2023.

Three other poets were born in Gaza. Mohammed Mousa grew up in Gaza’s Jabalia Refugee camp, but had moved to exile in Turkey before the genocide. His second collection, Salted Wounds (Drunk Muse Press), was reviewed here on December 6 last year.

His friend and colleague Mosab Abu Toha had already won international recognition and it was only this that forced the Israelis to release him, though badly beaten, after kidnapping him when the first wave of Gazans were driven out of north Gaza before Christmas. His poem What is Home? appeared here on November 22 and is also widely available online.

Ali Abu Khattab, less known as yet, is a refugee in exile in Norway.

Other poets belong to the ever-growing Palestinian diaspora, but of course Gaza is often in the forefront of their work.

From Marwan Makhoul, there is Portrait of the People of Gaza, and Hello Beit Hanoun in the form of a phone call to the Beit Hanoun district of Gaza.

There is The Journalist from Farid Bitar — at the time of writing this review, 171 Gaza journalists have been murdered. Naomi Shibhab Nye’s Before I was a Gazan, also widely circulated online, speaks in the voice of a schoolboy talking about the time he lost his maths homework submission, who finishes by saying: “And now I would do anything/ for a problem I could solve.”

If Gaza is like a black hole, dragging poets into a necessary witnessing, there are also more general pieces on exile, and the longing for home. Tariq Luthan writes I Go To The Backyard To Pick Mint Leaves For My Mother; Deema Shehabi remembers her uncle’s wedding, when the bodies laid out on the living room floor were the sleeping wedding guests.

Smokestack Books, along with Alan Morrison and Atef Alshaer have performed a vital service in bringing this anthology out so fast; poetry that is, as Alshaer and Morrison say, collective in its grief, and serious in its demand for attention and solidarity.

Palestinian voices are currently being suppressed with all the power of an Islamophobic Establishment, and Israel’s genocide attempts to wipe out not only a people but also their culture. 

This anthology is well worth all your attention and solidarity.