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agriculture of grief: prayers for my father's dementia charts the gradual loss of a beloved parent to dementia. The poems here attempt to navigate multiple landscapes of mourning, multiple iterations of loss. They are quite literally grounded in grief, calling on Shomali's father's relationship to the land as a farmer and a Palestinian. The poems also reference Catholic faith practices, sacraments, and prayers. Shomali invokes, questions, and resists that religiosity as she reckons with her father's relationship to his faith. The poems are at times religious and at times sacrilegious. Written primarily in English, with some Arabic and Arabish interspersed throughout, the poems play with translation, transliteration, code switching, and refusal. The poems experiment with form and lyric, attendant to sound and song especially. Anchored in language and loss, agriculture of grief explores grief as the final form of love, and the capacity and limits of prayer as a kind of mourning.
About the author
mejdulene bernard shomali is a queer Palestinian poet and associate professor in women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Williams College. she is the author of Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke University Press 2023).
