Preorder ‡ Batool Abu Akleen, 48Kg. / ٤٨ كغم

Tenement #19 / ISBN: 978-1-917304-03-0
135pp [Approx.] / 140 x 216mm
Translated from the Arabic by the poet, 
with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami,
Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves

Forthcoming, 16.05.25

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A debut collection from the Palestinian
poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet
in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight
poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram;
a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and
visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the
midsts of unspeakable violence.

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هكذا أطهو حزني / This is how I cook my grief

I pick fresh hearts from the street
the most defeated ones
with nimble fingers I steal the tears
I fill rusted sardine tins with the smell of sorrow.
Mothers’ glances cling tight to their eyes
but I snatch them easily, because I resemble their children.

In a copper pot
I boil what I’ve stolen,
add the blood that hadn't been absorbed
& sawdust from a coffin meant as the door to a new home.
I pour the mixture into my heart
until it blackens.
This is how I cook my grief.

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Editor’s Note

I was introduced to the poetry of Batool Abu Akleen thanks to an Italian translation written by Aldo Nicosia for an anthology of women’s poetry and art dedicated to the memory of Etel Adnan.

I was impressed with this young poet’s ability for close observation and empathy and by the immediacy and vividness of her language. In one instance, in a poem she wrote at the age of fifteen in 2020, she takes on the voice of a mother to describe daily life in a Palestinian refugee camp and the physical and psychic impact of the violence of borders on adults and children alike. Publication of the anthology, for which I wrote an English version of that poem, led to a series of events and exhibitions in which some of Batool’s paintings were also shown, and to the beginning of our correspondence and friendship. Thanks to her good command of English and to her perseverance and courage against the ongoing massacre of her people, we were able to co-translate a number of other poems.

Over the past few months, while going through a number of evacuations, continuing her studies via distance learning following the razing of her faculty in Gaza City, holding English classes for some of the children residing in the camp where she lives and honouring her commitments as translator in residence for Modern Poetry in Translation, Batool has worked to assemble her first collection and make English versions of her poems—most of them self-translated, except for a few made in collaboration with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Yasmin Zaher or myself.

On receiving her first draft, I was once again struck, not only by her determination in speaking with unflinching precision the horror that would leave us speechless, but by her ability to stay with the internal logic and structure of her collection as she navigates grey no man’s lands of exhaustion, shock and survivor’s guilt. Her spare & lucid language wakes us from the glare of generic live streamed indignation as she watches bomber planes named for First Nation people murdered in an earlier genocide buzzing overhead, the rude health of soldiers’ bodies and its lethal potential for seductiveness fed by institutionalised robbery, murder and rhetoric, children turning their own fathers’ age in a few seconds.

Observing the daily endurance and human failings of those around her, imagining liberation by utopian transformation or divine intervention (I’m reminded here of Elia Suleiman’s 2002 film of that title), openly voicing her anger and loss, not asking why (‘hier ist kein warum,’ as Primo Levi recalled) but fighting absurdity by its own weapons (‘I was wandering the streets in search of a second-hand ceasefire’), Akleen reaches out for a space of shared humanity where life and poetry are welcomed and nurtured. I can only praise her for creating such a space within herself against forbidding conditions and salute her as she takes her place with the fellow poets she honours by her work.  

Cristina Viti, MMXXIV

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See here for a further word on this title.

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Stickered editions will carry a cover adornment; a reproduction of a photograph of Gaza's 'Old Town,' circa 1862 (an albumen print ℅ the Library of Congress).

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Batool Abu Akleen is a poet and translator from Gaza, Palestine. She started writing at the age of ten, and at the age of fifteen, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘It Wasn’t Me Who Stole the Cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes and later included in the Italian anthology Di acqua e di tempo / Of Water and Time. Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages, including English and Italian, and featured in numerous international publications. Her work was recently included in the July 2024 issue of mpT: Modern Poetry in Translation, ‘Salem to Gaza,’ and she was the magazine’s 2024 ‘Poet / Translation in Residence.’

Graham Liddell is a writer, translator, and PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His dissertation is a study of the narration of contemporary Arab and Afghan migration experiences in both published literature and the asylum process. In 2019/2020, he conducted fieldwork and interviews with asylum seekers while volunteering in Greece. His translations of two short stories from Emile Habiby’s collection Sextet of the Six-Day War were published in Banipal in 2022. Prior to graduate school, Graham worked in journalism, focusing on the Arab world and its diasporas. His writing has been published in USA Today, Middle East Eye, and the Detroit News, among other publications.

Wiam El-Tamami is an Egyptian writer, translator and editor. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in publications such as Granta, The Paris Review, Freeman’s, Ploughshares, AGNI, Literary Hub, CRAFT, The Massachusetts Review, and ArabLit, among others. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Prize, was shortlisted for the 2023 Disquiet International Prize, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2024. She is currently based in Berlin.

Cristina Viti is a translator and poet working with Italian, English and French. Her most recent publication includes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger (Tenement Press, 2022; see here), a co-translation of poems by Anna Gréki, The Streets of Algiers and Other Poems (Smokestack Books, 2020), and her translation of Elsa Morante’s The World Saved by Kids and Other Epics (Seagull Books, 2016), which was shortlisted for the John Florio Prize. Viti held collaborative translation workshops within the Radical Translations project run by the French and Comparative Literature departments of King’s College; Tenement’s imprint No University Press published an anthology of texts resulting of these workshops in 2024, An Anarchist Playbook (see here).

Yasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer. Her journalism has appeared in Al-Monitor, Haaretz, and Times of Israel. Her debut novel, The Coin (Catapult)—a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice—was published in 2024.