Books I have read here:

“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.”

“I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.”

“The root of terrorism is terror
Etymologically derived from
The Spanish word tierra // Meaning land

Or maybe // The root of terrorism is error
Etymologically derived from
The Greek // Err // Meaning to be incorrect

Or maybe we err in the etymology
Maybe we’re wrong // To think terrorism means
One who exists incorrectly on this land”

from “THE TERRORIST SHAVED HIS BEARD”

“In early September 2021, Mahmoud Al-Ardah and five other men escaped the Zionist prison of Gilboa, where they were all sentenced to live because of their resistance to the occupation of their ancestral land. They dug a tunnel with spoons, patiently dreaming about freedom on the other side. They didn’t communicate with anybody on the outside for fear of repercussions, they just dug.

[ . . . .]

When I read about Mahmoud Al-Ardah, I cried again. Because prison in all its cruelty reproduces the abomination of colonialism by taking land away, by disconnecting us from plants and ecosystems and ancestral practices. The purpose of prison is to take us so far away from land and community and relationship that we forget that we belong to each other, and to the seeds, the birds, the sun, the sky.”

“Before another body is buried, a window is broken.
A window was broken. The window is broken.

In a high school history class, white children raised
their eyebrows when I raised my voice.

I don’t know what they thought I was capable of;
I wish I was more capable of it.”

-From “Violence” by Zaina Alsous