cannot wait to read ‘rifqa,’ muhammed el kurd’s book of poetry, named after his grandmother rifqa. this is how susan abulhawa reviewed it:
“The words that Mohammed assembles in his poems aren’t pulled from books or dictionaries. They are snatched from clouds, excised from his bones, excavated from Jerusalem’s fabled tales and the inscriptions on her storied stones, plucked from the creases in tank treads and history’s smoke. There is rage in this book—piercing, defiant, inspiring rage that ebbs and returns, and settles in blank spaces that push words far apart on the page.
Unlike the lightness of the word rifqa, this book is heavy, weighed with 103 years of Rifqa’s life as a refugee warrior, a woman of infinite final words—which Mohammed calls punchlines—of a matriarch’s expansive love, a colonized indigenous people’s anguished longing to breathe, and a globalizing irreverence rising from what is muted, buried, razed, and painted over.”