The Earth in the Attic
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Fady Joudah; Foreword by Louise Glück
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Format: PaperPrice: $18.00
Click here to listen to Fady Joudah read "In the Calm" from his poem, "Pulse."
"The Earth in the Attic reads like a quiet storm of human emotions and experiences. . . . Joudah's poems explore loss, displacement, suffering, and longing. They drift from the personal and specific to the larger stories of peoples and nations that Joudah encounters. . . . [His] unique talent is to offer poetry readers a look at a wounded and fractured world through his eyes."—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, The Institute for Middle East Understanding
Winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, 2007
In The Earth in the Attic Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American physician, explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget.”
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American medical doctor and a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. He lives in Houston, TX. He is also the translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s recent poetry The Butterfly’s Burden.
"The Earth in the Attic underscores Fady Joudah's great talent for exacting naked feelings that engage the age-old mysteries of this world, while maintaining a levelheaded residence amidst the everyday vagaries of modern life. The poems here radiate from the personal out into the larger world, propelling along moments of light and transcendence. With a quiet certainty, Fady Joudah names those ordinary things that hold everything in focus, grounded in a fabular mystery that resonates in the twenty-first century."—Yusef Komunyakaa
Publication Date: April 15, 2008
