<p>Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.\nArt. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before “our wild rosebush, neglected / by the gate, / blooms.” Lovers who don’t return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In You Can Be the Last Leaf, these are the ordinary and profound—sometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolous—moments of life under Israeli occupation.\nHere, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling”: whether it’s coming up with “plans / to solve the world’s problems,” plans that “eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans,” or dreaming “of a war / that’s got no war in it,” or proclaiming that “I don’t believe in survival.”\nIn You Can Be the Last Leaf, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority—at once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.</p>

You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Abu Al-Hayyat, Maya

History & Criticism

MILKWEED EDITIONS *

<p>The history of walls—as a way to keep people in or out—is also the history of people managing to get around, over and under them. From the Berlin Wall and the Mexico–US border, to the barbed wire fences of Bangladesh’s refugee camps, the short stories in this anthology explore the barriers that have sought to divide communities and nations, and their traumatic effects on people’s lives and histories. At a time when more walls are being built than are being brought down, All Walls Collapse brings together writing from across national, ethnic and linguistic borders, challenging the political impulse to separate and segregate, and celebrating the role of literature in traversing division.</p>

All Walls Collapse: Stories of Separation

Shin, Kyung-Sook

Scott, Paulo

Shree, Geetanjali

Tóth, Krisztina

El Hasnaoui Ahmed, Zahra

Soteriou, Constantia

Pablo Villalobos, Juan

Abdul’ehed, Muyesser

Khan, Rezuwan

Boehning, Larissa

Literary

Comma Press

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Books by Abu Al-Hayyat, Maya