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.”