cannot wait to read \u2018rifqa,\u2019 muhammed el kurd\u2019s book of poetry, named after his grandmother rifqa. this is how susan abulhawa reviewed it:
\u201cThe words that Mohammed assembles in his poems aren\u2019t pulled from books or dictionaries. They are snatched from clouds, excised from his bones, excavated from Jerusalem\u2019s fabled tales and the inscriptions on her storied stones, plucked from the creases in tank treads and history\u2019s smoke. There is rage in this book\u2014piercing, 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\u2019s life as a refugee warrior, a woman of infinite final words\u2014which Mohammed calls punchlines\u2014of a matriarch\u2019s expansive love, a colonized indigenous people\u2019s anguished longing to breathe, and a globalizing irreverence rising from what is muted, buried, razed, and painted over.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
cannot wait to read \u2018rifqa,\u2019 muhammed el kurd\u2019s book of poetry, named after his grandmother rifqa. this is how susan abulhawa reviewed it: \u201cThe words that Mohammed assembles in his poems aren\u2019t pulled from books or dictionaries. They are snatched from clouds, excised from his bones, excavated from Jerusalem\u2019s fabled tales and the inscriptions on … Continue reading rifqa by muhammed el kurd<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,15,14,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19098"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19099,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19098\/revisions\/19099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}