[07/07/26] Alcalay, Ammiel: Imperial Abhorrences / For Palestine

Birds, LLC, paperback

Illustrated by Kholoud Hammad

Translated by Khaled al-Hilli, Sinan Antoon, and Antón Shammás

Publication Date: July 7, 2026

Publisher Marketing: Imperial Abhorrences / For Palestine is a collaboration between poet and translator Ammiel Alcalay in New York and Palestinian artist and graphic designer Kholoud Hammad in Gaza. Drawn in a notebook small enough to fit in a displacement bag, and using only the pens she has at hand, Hammad's miniature drawings are epic in proportion and intention, depicting horror, resistance, and beauty during the ongoing Israeli/US perpetrated genocide in Gaza. Alcalay's acerbic and searing poems draw on an acute sense of history, as well as his experience, knowledge, outrage, and solidarity. The poetry and artwork is accompanied by an interview with Hammad conducted by US artist Tabitha Arnold, a statement by Hammad, and Alcalay's "The Poetics of Geopolitics: A Word After." In addition, some of Alcalay's poems appear in Arabic translation by Khaled al-Hilli, Sinan Antoon, and antón shammás. This unique project summons readers and viewers alike to come into a realization of their own powers despite the myriad forces marshaled against such activation.

These poems confront the violence of empire and the cost of looking away. Rejecting euphemism and false balance, Ammiel Alcalay's poems bear witness to injustice and name the systems that enable it. At once elegy, indictment, and moral record, Imperial Abhorrences / For Palestine asks what it means to speak truth in a world trained to forget and insists that poetry remains an act of resistance.

While enduring a live-streamed genocide alongside her family in Gaza, Kholoud Hammad continued to create art, an art that holds the beauty of life against the machinery of annihilation and refuses to surrender humanity to terror or silence. —Mosab Abu Toha

Ammiel Alcalay is a great poet with an open and beautiful mind…words that carry the weight of cultures and the spirit of humanity…he is the Sinbad of civilization. —Nasser Rabah

The primary way a dying empire props itself up is by creating a mythology about several elsewheres, places it inflicts violence on, for example. And what happens, as empire flails, is that a place and its people are reduced to the products of a most nefarious and useless imagination, which, too, is an extension of violence. I have immense gratitude for the work of Ammiel Alcalay and Kholoud Hammad within this book, which is teeming with questions and sharp, needed indictments, but also with beautiful language, which animates the fullness of Gaza, the people in it, the broad scope of the art that can be made, and the imaginations that can bloom while under siege from failing empires with no imagination themselves. I hope the time you spend immersed in this book moves you to awe at what does exist, and moves you to rage, when considering all that could have existed. —Hanif Abdurraqib

Throughout the war and the invasion of Jabalia, amid the bombs and constant displacement, Kholoud Hammad continued to work to support her family. She created a series of artworks named Shadows Under Fire, embodying both resistance and the pain left by the war. She chose to work in black-and-white to convey how life had lost its color, using red as the only other hue to represent the blood she witnessed at such a young age. —Sarvy Garanpayeh