In his second book of poems, Ahmad Almallah seeks a language that captures the afterlives of the mother tongue. This collection blurs the borders between languages, between the living and the dead, between presence and absence. Here the exilic idea of a return to a home is expressed in the daily return to the blank page in search of a poem. In these returns the body brushes against the past and, as Hart Crane puts it, taps into “that memory all things nurse.”

"These poems are infinite and steadily moving in memory of all that’s gone, and all that will be regained. A piercing collection."
—Nathalie Handal

"Almallah’s writing is immensely relevant; we need his voice."
—Naomi Shihab Nye

Ahmad Almallah grew up in Bethlehem, Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia where he is an artist-in-residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Bitter English (Phoenix Poets Series, University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Border Wisdom (Winter Editions, 2023). He received the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his sequence of poems “Recourse,” won the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Jacket2, Michigan Quarterly, Cordite, APR, and Poetry, among others.