[B4G] Almallah, Ahmad: Border Wisdom

Winter Editions, paperback

Publication Date: November 2, 2023

Publisher Marketing: 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. The poems of Border Wisdom break and mourn physical borders at the same time. 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." | "Almallah's writing is immensely relevant; we need his voice." --Naomi Shihab Nye || "Ahmad Almallah observes the dust that rises when war and grief collide in the rubble of brief existences made briefer by geopolitical devastations. These poems honor the daily trembling and unexpected questions that accompany the losses of one's spaces of origin--one's mother, one's land, one's language. I won't lie and say that it is easy to read this unflinching work, these searing confrontations with the lividity and ferocity of grief. But I admire a poet who is unafraid to rise up and be a pallbearer, who is unafraid to point out the difficulty of holding in our memory what we would rather hold in our arms." --Divya Victor || "Reading this book, one comes to understand that one of the most astounding, paradoxical companions to our grief is precision. Via his very syntax, through the intermingling of silence and sigh, Ahmad Almallah creates a sober and tender and bitter account of a journey that is loss-of one's beloved, one's land, one's hope-and, according to his version of events, it is loss that nurtures, disciplines, and gifts the desire of writing." --Polina Barskova