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"quiet orient riot is a book about birth regimes and the politics of reproduction. Tracing the immaculate conception of a child through to her birth, it unspools the many ways that liturgical commands and an intense demographic anxiety affect a journey towards motherhood. What does it mean to bear a Palestinian child in the occupied Palestinian territory, enabled through contingent access to Israel's sophisticated fertility treatment infrastructure? How do you bear a body whose very creation is enabled by the pronatalist state, yet not recognized by it? How do you end up a national vessel? Are we all national vessels? While the journey is specific and localized, the larger questions that emerge from these poems are not: what kind of language may hold precarious life? What kind of poem may see a body held inside a body through emergency, diminishment and into resistance, bloom? Importantly, and over and above demographic and religious imperatives, these poems are concerned with other kinds of worship, bowing to a "chirpy printed sound," "what grows in the rubble," and "the capacity for happiness despite visual evidence." Where you look, there are water holes for the thirsty and a grove of "little justices."--
About the author
Nathalie Khankan teaches Arabic language and literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is the founding director of the Danish House in Palestine. Her work has previously appeared in the
Berkeley Poetry Review,
jubilat, and
Crab Creek Review. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughters.
