You Must Live

Reviews / Votes

These poems testify to the resilience of the artists, and the role that poetry still has to give voice and bear witness in times of crisis. Unsurprisingly, there's a taut urgency throughout... There's joy and humour too, even if the latter is pitch black -- Rishi Dastidar * Guardian * A light beam of a collection in our dark hours. These poets managed the seemingly impossible: to build life-affirming yet daring linguistic nodes among the rubble of our world and our world's imagination. This is a landmark work, a center from which myriad new ways of thinking and being will flourish -- Ocean Vuong After years of massive sorrow and staggering dehumanization, this collection represents some of what has been lost--the neighborhoods; the exquisite loving consciousness; the proud and humble society; the triumphant bravery of precious human beings, families like yours and mine, who never stopped speaking and singing. This book should be required reading for every human being, especially those who have contributed to this disaster... a triumph after ongoing catastrophe -- Naomi Shihab Nye Everyone with any humanity in the face of what is happening in Palestine should read this outstanding collection of poetry. These words emerging from among the ruins of Gaza and from the devastation in the West Bank have an electric immediacy, a burning anger, a sadness over what has been lost, and a graphic sense of time and place which, for some of these poets, is a recording of their last moments of life. It is impossible to read these poems and remain unmoved, impossible not to feel awe for their courage, and impossible not to share their mixed anger and sadness. Like the greatest war poetry, more than any picture, any video, any reportage can, the words of these poets convey the full horror of life under siege. -- Rashid Khalidi You Must Live gathers testamentary art miraculously composed, in the midst of genocide, by poets who have borne unspeakable losses, the majority of whom are still within the debris fields of Gaza, survivors now on the precipice of famine, yet with pens in hand, in the ancient tradition of al-woquouf ala al-atlal, 'standing in the ruins' of the beloved. These poems are flares in a terrible darkness, here to show us the way back to our humanity -- Carolyn Forche