[11/18/25] Hawwash, Samer Abu / Fakhreddine, Huda J. (tr.): Ruins and Other Poems

World Poetry, paperback

Publication Date: November 18, 2025

Publisher Marketing: In these poems, Samer Abu Hawwash stands upon ancient and modern ruins, engaging with the archetypal Arabic qasida and its echoes in the present, set against a backdrop of exile, displacement, and genocide. The site of the ruin, the journey, and the return home are the three movements of the archetypal Arabic form with which Samer contends in his book-length poem. Writing in and from the moment of crisis, the poet keeps returning to ruins, forfeiting the journey and the hope of return and resolution, rearranging the elements of poetry in the Arabic tradition in search of closure or consolation—in a gesture, a shadow, a memory, an object. The five poems that follow “Ruins” in this book root themselves in monumental loss. When “it no longer matters if anyone loves us” and “we will lose this war,” nothing remains but the poem, the witness, the signpost in the wasteland of history.

“Samer Abu Hawwash is the solemn yet glinting revelation of a seer by circumstance; his poetry is prophetic because it remembers—is remembering—not only the past, but the future, that is, the ruins, in which is reflected, as in a thousand scattered mirrors, the lucid, inextinguishable soul of everything that once was. Rendered in immediate, tactile, moving translation by the dauntless, extraordinary Huda Fakhreddine, this is poetry as visionary intimacy: the carrying of the soul “on the edge of this abyss, that is the world.” —BRANDON SHIMODA

“Samer Abu Hawwash’s poems do not fear to dwell in the negative: ‘Morning didn’t come; / I wasn’t.’ Faced with the demise of daybreak, their words move among time’s broken limbs. Spears of grass converse with abandoned pillows in a world emptied of human presence. Speech is unreliable, appearances uncertain. Even wood is grief-stricken. As ‘another butterfly falls / from language,’ existence is shattered into a prevalence of line-break. And yet the poem persists. In ‘the slaughtered air,’ the speaker keeps community with the dead: ‘I embrace you to my chest / You embrace me into your soul / I carry your soul, / & you carry my corpse.’ That these texts probe the depths of the Palestinian catastrophe while engaging with the Arabic poetics of the ruin is a testament to Abu Hawwash’s command of his tradition and his craft. That they speak so potently to the anglophone reader is a testament to the rare power and rigor of Huda Fakhreddine’s translation.” —OMAR BERRADA