An exquisite and humane collection set to leave its mark on American poetics of the body and the body politic.
In Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, Fady Joudahhas written love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved. Here he celebrates moments of delight and awe with his wife, his mentors, his friends, and the beauty of the natural world. Yet he also finds tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared, bringing together the language of medicine with the language of desire in images at once visceral and vulnerable. A symptomatic moon. A peach, quartered like a heart, and a heart, quartered like a peach."I call the finding of certain things loss."
Joudah is a translator between the heart and the mind, the flesh and the more-than-flesh, the wordbodyand the world body-and between languages, with a polyglot's hyperresonant sensibility.In "Sagittal Views," the book's middle section, Joudah collaborates with Golan Haji, a Kurdish Syrian writer, to foreground the imaginative act of constructing memory and history. Together they mark the place the past occupies in the body, the cut that "runs deeper than speech."
Generousin its scope, inventive in its movements and syntax, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearanceis a richly rewarding and indispensable collection.
Autorentext
Fady Joudah has published three books of poems, The Earth in the Attic, Alight, and Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is cellphone character count. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN Translation Award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement Prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.
Inhalt
Contents
I.
The Magic of Apricot
Tricolor
Progress Notes
Echo #1
Thank You
Maqam of Palm Trees
Horses
1st Love
Beanstalk
Colored Rings
The Hour of the Grackle
Footnotes to a Picture
National Park
Plethora
Epithalamion
An Algebra Come Home
Chamber Music
The Scream
The Living Are the Minority
Footnotes to a Song
II. Sagittal Views
After No Language
In the Garden
After Wine
I, the Sole Witness to My Despair, Declare
Europa and the Bull
"Wisswass"
Last Night's Fever, This Morning's Murder
I, the Sole Witness to My Despair, Declare
Alignment
In a Cemetery under a Solitary Walnut Tree That Crows
III.
Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance
Kohl
Body of Meaning
Tea and Sage
Nonterminal
Poem for Godot
Echo #14
Palestine, Texas
Some Things
The Floor Is Yours
Bloodline
I Dreamed You
38, 7, 31, 4
Traditional Anger (in the Sonora)
Almost Your Life
Corona Radiata
Sphinx Poem
I Love My Life
My Shakespeare
Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance
Acknowledgments and Notes