“Garden Variety” and “Maqluba,” two poems by writer and translator Lena Tuffaha, traverse the brutalized landscapes of Palestinian history as well as the deceptions of Western diplomacy.

Poet and translator Fady Joudah’s “Habibi Yamma” explores Palestinian motherhood and childhood, grief and survival, from the Nakba to the present genocide in Gaza. Image credit: Malak Mattar, “when peace dies, embrace it. it will live again” (acrylic on canvas, 2021).

Poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah’s “Palestinian” was translated from Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine. As the Gaza genocide unfolds in front of our eyes, Nasrallah’s poem ricochets between paralysis and struggle: “I died and lived. I lit myself on fire. I put myself out with my own ashes, / and nothing…

In this brief lyric, poet and translator Noah Mazer skewers liberalism’s incessant denunciations of Palestine’s armed struggle against colonial dispossession.

Poet Amie Zimmerman’s “Plain Speech” is a call for radical endurance from within the imperial core: “we swim in the weapons quarry,” she writes. But “when the quarry is drained let them find nothing.”

In “Fugue 35 | Overproduction / Reintegration,” poet Joe Hall explores the ways in which wage labor drains the meaning from our social relations, asking: “What can we do when this work that we hate is all we have between / us.” This poem originally appeared in Hall’s latest collection…

An excerpt from Laura Jaramillo’s poem “Handedness,” a gorgeous exploration of the politics of language, work, and direct action. “Handedness” originally appeared in her 2022 collection Making Water (Futurepoem).

Cahuilla poet Emily Clarke’s “learning how to read” responds to the stultifying demands placed on Indigenous writers to perform a simplistic, often neocolonial caricature of Native struggle: “will you guide a flight of goosebumps up our arms,” they ask, “as / you use your mouth to mold white guilt into…

In “Dimestore novels were documentaries,” poet and essayist Lyta Gold explores how the language of the supernatural and extraterrestrial inflects everyday life.

In “For Every Eclipse, A Contradiction,” poet Madeline Lane-McKinley reflects on the history of solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle –– and the complicity of those who remain silent.