Wrong Winds

“There aren’t marks to frame how I like or read or grasp at these poems. I found myself crying at a table in my lostness. Dear Ahmad, you hit all these places at once, disjunctive illumination. English being cut and punned and diced and injected with rhyme, shadow and ‘the Arabic tongue sticks out like a lizard.’ War time is daytime even if you are not there. It’s autumn. Aphoristic, cracked perfectly, someone (here) yelps to fill time, an impossible operation. Are we talking genocide now? It’s history. The bodies are on your phone.”—Eileen Myles

“Wrong Winds is an epitome of poetic labor: a book that teaches the awesome responsibility of being fully human. Ahmad Almallah imagines a language for survival on a planet where people and morality are routinely and casually displaced, and offers pathways for us to come to terms with the world we are creating: a place that contains utmost beauty and unutterable hurt. Long after Palestine is free, these urgent poems will remain touchstones of what counters the degradation of the human spirit.”—Anna Badkhen

“Almallah’s writing is immensely relevant; we need his voice.”—Naomi Shihab Nye