The Poetry of Palestine

You Must Live brings together some of the most remarkable poets living and writing in Palestine today, from renowned international prize winners to talented emerging voices. Composed over the past few years and gathered under desperate conditions, these poems, which appear in the original Arabic alongside English translations, are haunted by the long spectre of occupation, transforming laments for lost family, friends and places into a new vision of home. This is a poetry of witness and profound lyric imagination, attuned to the hidden beauty of the natural landscape, the music of sparrows under crowded skies, the electricity of complex desire, daring to conceive a dazzling future beyond dispossession and military siege. You Must Live is the latest entry into the rich tradition of Palestinian poetry, negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, to provide a glimpse into the full interiority of Palestinian life. ... Originally published by Drum & Spear, the publishing arm of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance links twelve poets working in a poetics of refusal and of hope. Bearing witness to decades of Zionist occupation, to a diaspora exiled in refugee camps and writers held captive in Israeli jails, the collection offers a means to an end: “as poetry, yes it sings—as bullets on a mission; it calls for change.” In each poem is a whole life—joy, love, beauty, rage, sorrow, suffering—and in each life is a record of resistance: the traces of a people who refuse to leave their homeland, who time and again alchemize grief into principled struggle. In the intertwined histories of this book, and in the unyielding political edge of the poems themselves, is a long story of solidarity between oppressed peoples: from Palestine to South Africa to Algeria to Vietnam to the United States.