Full Description
Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Translation
Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.
Art. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before "our wild rosebush, neglected / by the gate, / blooms." Lovers who don't return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In You Can Be the Last Leaf, these are the ordinary and profound—sometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolous—moments of life under Israeli occupation.
Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. "It matters to me," writes Abu Al-Hayyat, "what you're thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling": whether it's coming up with "plans / to solve the world's problems," plans that "eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans," or dreaming "of a war / that's got no war in it," or proclaiming that "I don't believe in survival."
In You Can Be the Last Leaf, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority—at once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.
Contents
Contents
Foreword
I. (from The Book of Fear, 2021)
My House
A Road for Loss
What If
Ordinary Grief
From, To
Fear
Like a Domestic Animal
We
I Don't Ask Anymore
Massacres
Similarities
Plans
Your Laughter
Return
Some Microbes
Ads
Art
Revision
You Can't
II. (from House Dresses and Wars, 2016)
Lovers Swap Language
Search
The Kids Are Screaming Now
Out from under a House Dress
Mothers Arrange Their Aches at Night
Revolution
We Were Young, You Gave Us a Home
Oh My We've Grown
Penniless
I Suffer a Phobia Called Hope
I Burn Time
We Could Die in a Traffic Accident
Sex
My Laugh
Since They Told Me . . .
Whistling
Daily I Imagine Them
I'm Not Saying You Lie
I Don't Believe in Greats
Wedding Anniversary
Wishes
Trash
Energy
III. (from That Smile, That Heart, 2012)
Mahmoud
Children
Elegy for the Desire of Mothers
Almost Dead, Almost Alive
Psychology News
Daydream
That Smile, That Heart
Empty Repetitive State
I Didn't Love and Wasn't Loved
I
In Love
IV. (from What She Spoke of Him, 2006)
A Contemporary Novel
About Him
The Upcoming Dervish Dance
What She Left in You
The Looming Wide Path
