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From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

Praise for Tethered to Stars “This is what we have had to do, amid pandemic, grief, political chaos, fires, human rights disasters: continue on with our lives. Doing chores [. . .] taking walks [. . .] teaching kids [. . .] trying to stay steady. In his brilliant forthcoming book, Tethered to Stars, Fady Joudah writes about the mysterious cosmos swirling with intricate linkages—as his phone is pinging. Ah, yes, Jerusalem, the Holy City! Right now, let’s call all our cities holy. Let’s hope our trees continue to communicate, whatever humans can or can’t accomplish.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, New York Times Magazine“True to its title, Joudah’s collection of poems musically connects the body to the Earth and the Earth to the stars [. . .] It’s earthy and ethereal, as we are.”—Houston Chronicle“Joudah centers his fifth poetry collection on the 12 star signs and other astrological phenomena, blending his physician's penchant for precision and the poet's ear for lyricism [. . .] What shines most brightly here is Joudah's ability to render extended imagery that plays out over several poems. An uprooted oak in one poem creates a place to plant olive pits in another. Dandelion and sunflower florets populate the pages. Butterflies lay eggs in lemon trees and enchant speakers from afar [. . .] Another stellar entry in this poet's expansive body of work.”—Booklist“This is a treatise on cosmic unity that does not shy away from grief, but that yearns for the immense, abstract sense of possibility, believing that ‘a heart remains a heart in its beyond’ [. . .] The clarity of Joudah’s imagery is countered by a complex choral voice that feels at turns analytical and biblical in its rise and fall. Each poem seems to be spoken from various perspectives, the roving voices echoing and replacing one another in their observations until both the speaker and addressee dissolve. ‘You’ll be everywhere,’ one poem closes. Joudah offers a nuanced vision of what connects man to the cosmos in this deeply searching book.”—Publishers Weekly“The poems in this brilliant book themselves stand beside our own sadnesses and grow large in our imaginations, like trees. [. . .] These poems, many among Joudah’s finest so far, are as intimate as the night sky.”—McSweeney’s“So much of Tethered to Stars grapples with what is difficult to understand. From the nature of stars to racial tension, mortality, and his own cultural heritage, Joudah uses his lyricism to attempt to uncover life's mysteries. This collection deals with these complex and inexplicable topics, and yet it does so in a way that never abandons its tenderness, curiosity, and admiration for the beauty of the world.”—The West Review“The poems in Fady Joudah’s Tethered to Stars reflect a poet’s pinnacle, where readers experience the vision of a virtuosic poet who possesses multiple registers and allusive riches, transfor

Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.