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“I wrote poetry before I wrote anything else,” says Susan Abulhawa, esteemed Palestinian American author and social activist, in the introduction to her first book of poems, My Voice Sought the Wind. This new work followed her highly acclaimed novel, Mornings in Jenin, which has been translated into 32 languages since it was published in 2010.
My Voice Sought the Wind represents five years of Abulhawa’s best poems on the timeless themes of love, loss, identity, and family, brought to life through her vivid observations and intimate personal reflections. She writes from her own experience, with a style that is romantic, but tinged with disillusionment, often a bit sad and always introspective.
“Susan Abulhawa’s beautifully crafted poems are written in the great lyric tradition of Pablo Neruda and Mahmoud Darwish, and yet possess their own striking originality. Their themes range widely across a terrain littered with Palestinian memories and torments, the tangled joys of love and loss, and pervading all, an embrace of life itself in all its wildness.”
—Richard Falk, author of Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope
“Susan Abulhawa’s poetry stems from the long forgotten dark, luminous, tightly knit root of flesh and soul… The figure of the Palestinian she carves from the bark of the olive trees of the troubled landscape of her memory, is that of the oppressed, the violated, the exiled. But then, in her voice, suffering and exile only bring us closer to the intricate and true essence of life—and poetry: a relentless struggle for love, freedom, and dignity… Her flesh open, her soul open, Susan Abulhawa is able to capture in a handful of naked words the infinite anxiety, and the unaccomplished delight, of the wide human experience…”
—Amin Khan, poet and author of Vision of the Return
“Palestinian resistance has produced some of the most stunning poetry I’ve ever read and Susan Abulhawa’s My Voice Sought the Wind is exceptionally gripping and honest. Her verse can be blunt and potent, allowing us to peek into a world of defiance in the face of a million humiliations. And Abulhawa’s words of loving warmth in spite of occupation’s dehumanization is a kind of protest that gives me hope for us all.”
—Sherry Wolf, author, public speaker, and editor, International Socialist Review