Fady Joudah – författare

"With anatomical precision, Joudah illustrates scenes that are at once uncanny and contemporary, be it a Bedouin woman's lavender mourning veil, the chrome doors to an alchemist's home, or the mysterious speaker in 'Smoke,' who exits abruptly and claims to have 'scripts to write and scrolls to find,' a testament to the duties of attending physician and displaced poet alike. In both roles, Joudah has records to keep and history to revisit, and does so beautifully."—Booklist

The poems in Alight alternate between the estranging familial and strangely familiar, between burning and illumination. As father, husband, and physician, Fady Joudah gives children and vulnerable others voice in this hauntingly lyrical collection, where, with quiet ferociousness, one’s self can be reclaimed from suffering’s grip over mind and spirit.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, translator, and physician of internal medicine. He received his medical training from the Medical College of Georgia and University of Texas, and served with Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Louise Glück. In 2010 he received a PEN translation award for his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

"Joudah's poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions."—The Guardian

Emerging in the era of tweets and text messages, poet Fady Joudah has invented a new poetic form: textu. The "u" in textu echoes the one in haiku, and also emphasizes the intimate you. A textu poem has a single rule: be exactly 160 characters long. As theme, form, and style are wide opened, a textu reveals new possibilities and poetry in unexpected ways.

Textu

Your spine a river into the forestcan't tell the neurons for the trees

I light & lightyou up with sound profile

threading the image habitof pleasure

Conscience

When we learn how an infant in the wombSleeps precisely in a parent's pose

say with fist closedpillowing the temple

What will becomeof the poem

"A collection of poems that takes its form from the text message necessarily raises similar questions about attention, and attendant questions about empathy. Each poem in Fady Joudah's Textu was composed on a smart phone's text message screen, and is “exactly 160 characters long, specific to text message parameters." Aren't text messages the epitome of what we glance at in passing, and then just as quickly forget, in that often-described stream of information and stimulation?

This book is not a reductive critique of this stream, or what it is doing to us. Neither does the collection let its premise—the textu form—justify itself without inquiry, as though shaping a poem according to the strictures of a text message necessarily makes the poem interesting. Instead, the form feels central to these poems, and to what they are doing. Joudah has pointed out that for most people in the world who can't afford unlimited texting, exceeding the character count means incurring additional costs; the character is a unit of economic value. The constraint of character count in the book, then, is not only a new kind of meter. It is also a metonym for the ways in which our language and our relationships are constrained by the world in which we live: by taking their form from one born of late capitalism, the text message, what these poems implicitly suggest is that all of our communication—and all of our poems—are shaped by this system, whether we would prefer to hold our attention on this fact or not.

It is fitting, then, that even as Textu asks us to consider the context in which lyric poems are made, it draws on and locates itself within the lyric tradition. The textu form shares the lyric's feel of intimate address, the “u" in “textu" suggesting an interlocutor to whom the poems are addressed. And the poems in the collection take on, among other subjects, the conventionally lyric subjects of natural beauty, loss, and desire." —Margaree Little, Kenyon Review Online

Fady Joudah is a poet, translator, and emergency room physician. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He lives near Houston, Texas.

"[A] rare occurrence in the poetry world."—American Book Review

As a child, Ghassan Zaqtan lived in a refugee camp near the River Jordan. While that painful experience deeply influenced his poetry, when Zaqtan was awarded the prestigious Griffin International Prize, the judges noted: "His words turn dark into light, hatred into love, death into life. His magic leads us to the clearing where hope becomes possible, where healing begins across individuals, countries, races."

When interviewed by PBS for their special on Palestinian poets, Zaqtan said, "I am not the kind of person who will walk in front of the demonstration. I walk behind the demonstration in order to collect the small things that may fall, whether it's the handkerchief or a child's backpack or a purse."

This generous volume represents two decades of incandescent creativity.

Handkerchief

Nothing's left to say between useverything wentinto the train that hid its whistlein the smoke that didn't become a cloudin the departure that gathered your limbsNothing's left to say between usso let your death bethe insight of dazzling silverand let the sun of those citiesbe a rose on your shoulders

Ghassan Zaqtan is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and fiction, and has edited the poetry journal Al-Soua'ra and the literary magazine of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Bayader. He lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where he is the Founding Director of The House of Poetry.

The poems in Alight alternate between the estranging familial and strangely familiar, between burning and illumination. As father, husband, and physician, Fady Joudah gives children and vulnerable others voice in this hauntingly lyrical collection, where, with quiet ferociousness, one’s self can be reclaimed from suffering’s grip over mind and spirit.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, translator, and physician of internal medicine. He received his medical training from the Medical College of Georgia and University of Texas, and served with Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Louise Glück. In 2010 he received a PEN translation award for his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

"innehåller bland annat den oförglömliga Dedikation, som redan framstår som en klassiker. Med långsamma reflektioner över hur krigets språk tar sig in i perceptionen och sinnena, dikter som rymmer både humor och kärlek, framträder en djupt existentiell erfarenhet"

Sydsvenskan

"Att skriva fram en vision om framtid mitt i den största ödeläggelsen tycks ofattbart, men Joudahs generationsöverskridande vision visar vad palestinsk historia kan lära världen inte om död utan om överlevnad"

Dagens Nyheter

”Till dem som kommer att mördas under krigets sista dag. Till dem som kommer att mördas under den första dagen efter kriget. Till dem som förgås av skräck under humanitära pauser. En timme innan uppehållet, en minut efter. Till dem som dör av brustet hjärta under och efter kriget.”

[…] är den palestinsk-amerikanske poeten Fady Joudahs första bok på svenska. Den skrevs senhösten och vintern 2023, med utgångspunkt i Gaza, och gestaltar poetiskt och egensinnigt det stycke nutidshistoria som Joudah kallar för "utplåningens tid". I dikter som spänner mellan humor och sorg, som både rymmer barnteckningens grälla färger och djup cynism, skildrar Joudah räddningsarbetare täckta i damm som drar fram en flicka ur rasmassorna, skräckslagna grodungar, minnen av barndomslekar och gamla kärlekar, meditationer kring medeltida arabiska poeter och deras möten med verkliga och uppdiktade vargar, språkets kollaps och "imperiets stumma gamar, med sina utredningar om kadaver de inte har dödat." .

Fady Joudah är en palestinsk-amerikansk poet född 1971. Han har gett ut sex prisade diktsamlingar och översatt Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Zaqtan och Amjad Nasser från arabiska till engelska. Han är även en av grundarna till Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Fady Joudah arbetar som läkare och bor i Houston med sin familj.Athena Farrokhzad och Johannes Anyuru är två av Sveriges mest tongivande författare. Tillsammans har de under sommaren 2024 översatt [...] och skrivit ett efterord till boken.