cover image No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems, 2014–2024

No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems, 2014–2024

Najwan Darwish, trans. from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid. Yale Univ, $28 (248p) ISBN 978-0-300-27546-9

This powerful volume by Palestinian poet Darwish excerpts seven of his collections and introduces vibrant, previously unpublished work. Expansive in breadth and beauty, the collection catalogs a decade’s worth of Darwish’s meditations, lamentations, furies, fears, prayers, and revelations. Throughout, he reckons with what translator Abu-Zeid aptly calls “the precocious nature of Palestinian existence” in the face of horrifying historical and ongoing violence. The quiet, insistent thrust of Darwish’s spare and lyrical poetic line imparts “the world unfurling in an instant.” These poems joke, jab, mourn, and confide. “Write your orphaned lyric,” Darwish urges, and this telling becomes a “spiritual practice.” His poems demand that readers bear witness to the brutality inflicted on his people—“the colonizers and exploiters,/ the stealers of dreams”—but also invite a deeper understanding of Palestinian history and resilience. “That which is lost forever,” he writes, “that which no one knows/ but me—/ I want you to know it too.” The result is a moving, timely, and necessary collection. (Nov.)