You Can Be the Last Leaf - Selected Poems

"Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat"--

List of contents

Contents

Foreword

I. (from The Book of Fear, 2021)

My House

A Road for Loss

What If

Ordinary Grief

From, To

Fear

Like a Domestic Animal

We

I Don't Ask Anymore

Massacres

Similarities

Plans

Your Laughter

Return

Some Microbes

Ads

Art

Revision

You Can't

II. (from House Dresses and Wars, 2016)

Lovers Swap Language

Search

The Kids Are Screaming Now

Out from under a House Dress

Mothers Arrange Their Aches at Night

Revolution

We Were Young, You Gave Us a Home

Oh My We've Grown

Penniless

I Suffer a Phobia Called Hope

I Burn Time

We Could Die in a Traffic Accident

Sex

My Laugh

Since They Told Me . . .

Whistling

Daily I Imagine Them

I'm Not Saying You Lie

I Don't Believe in Greats

Wedding Anniversary

Wishes

Trash

Energy

III. (from That Smile, That Heart, 2012)

Mahmoud

Children

Elegy for the Desire of Mothers

Almost Dead, Almost Alive

Psychology News

Daydream

That Smile, That Heart

Empty Repetitive State

I Didn't Love and Wasn't Loved

I

In Love

IV. (from What She Spoke of Him, 2006)

A Contemporary Novel

About Him

The Upcoming Dervish Dance

What She Left in You

The Looming Wide Path

About the author

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is the author of You Can Be the Last Leaf. She is also the editor of The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction and a contributor to A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry. Her work has been published in The Guardian, the Irish Times, and Literary Hub. She is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers. Abu Al-Hayyat lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah.

Fady Joudah is the translator of You Can Be the Last Leaf. He is also the author of five collections of poems, including, most recently, Tethered to Stars and Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. He has translated from the Arabic collections by Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Zaqtan, and Amjad Nasser, and is the coeditor and cofounder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Griffin Poetry Prize, a PEN USA award for translation, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

Summary

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Translation

Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.

Art. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before “our wild rosebush, neglected / by the gate, / blooms.” Lovers who don’t return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In You Can Be the Last Leaf, these are the ordinary and profound—sometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolous—moments of life under Israeli occupation.

Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling”: whether it’s coming up with “plans / to solve the world’s problems,” plans that “eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans,” or dreaming “of a war / that’s got no war in it,” or proclaiming that “I don’t believe in survival.”

In You Can Be the Last Leaf, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority—at once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.

Foreword

Major galley campaign, with galleys available for the sales force by request, major media, poetry media, Palestinian American media, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss

Major media outreach, positioning this title as the introduction of a richly talented Palestinian poet to American readers, translated by a majorly acclaimed Palestinian American poet

Major bookseller campaign, with a focus on SIBA-affiliated bookstores, bookstores with strong translation sales, and feminist bookstores

Cover reveal and preorder social media campaign in collaboration with Houston bookstore

Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales, and academic lists of more than 30,000 contacts

Advertising in the Academy of American Poets, Mizna, ALTA, World Literature Today, and SIBA

Major virtual launches in Houston, Minneapolis, and New York City

Additional text

Praise for You Can Be the Last Leaf“Al-Hayyat's latest devastating and courageous collection captures the precarious everyday lives of Palestinians with enormous empathy and glistening clarity . . . The vivid translations by Fady Joudah will jostle readers into discomfort and pin Al-Hayyat's stunning voice into their ears.”—Booklist


“Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s brilliant secret is that she holds none. Here language is illuminated with the clarity of one who releases cogitation like pigeons. She writes manifestos with self-destruct buttons for all to push.”—Fady Joudah, author of Tethered to Stars

Praise for Fady Joudah’s Translations

“As a translator of poetry myself, I know the danger, frustration and the joy in the process of catching the fire from the original and delivering it through/into another language, another culture, another sentiment. Mr. Joudah delivered with such grace and power. My salute to Mr. Joudah, as translator to translator, as poet to poet.”—Judges’ Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize

“Translating writing of [Mahmoud Darwish’s] ambition—its radical, willed instability as well as its beauty—requires a delicate and thoughtful ear. . . . These fine translations will consolidate [Joudah’s] reputation. They also allow us to hear—in their fidelity to offbeat punctuation and lineation, to nuances of quotation and allusion—something of the formal innovation of the original.”—The Guardian

“No poet is as closely associated with contemporary Palestinian identity as Darwish . . . but, as this superbly translated selection of poems proves, the work resists classification, ranging over such themes as memory, inheritance, and exile.”—New Yorker

“As Neruda, Szymborska, Paz, and Ritsos offered American poets new possibilities for language and spirit in the past, so, too, does Darwish now. He has, in Joudah’s startling and tensile English, expended into us a new vastness.”—Kenyon Review

“Joudah’s translation offers a window into a masterful poet’s [Ghassan Zaqtan’s] oeuvre and enriches the English-language reader’s library with poems of soft-spoken wonder and hard-edged silences.”—World Literature Today

Product details

• Authors: Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Abu Al-Hayyat Maya, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
• Assisted by: Fady Joudah (Translation), Joudah Fady (Translation)
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 10.05.2022
• EAN: 9781571315403
• ISBN: 978-1-57131-540-3
• No. of pages: 88
• Dimensions: 139 mm x 215 mm x 9 mm
• Weight: 162 g
• Illustrations: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Other languages / Other literatures; POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Places, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Family, Poetry / poems by individual poets