Praise for You Must Live
"A light beam of a collection in our dark hours. These poets managed the seemingly impossible: to build life-affirming yet daring linguistic nodes among the rubble of our world and our world's imagination. This is a landmark work, a center from which myriad new ways of thinking and being will flourish."-Ocean Vuong
"Bowing down. In grief and in gratitude. I feel overwhelmed with respect and thanks for the enormous labors of Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, as well as Copper Canyon Press, [in] creating this comprehensive gathering of crucial Gazan and West Bank voices, and writing such an eloquent contextual introduction. After years of massive sorrow and staggering dehumanization, this collection represents some of what has been lost–the neighborhoods; the exquisite loving consciousness; the proud and humble society; the triumphant bravery of precious human beings, families like yours and mine, who never stopped speaking and singing. Over here in the United States, we sorrow, we weep, we feel fury at the role our own country has chosen in this disaster, and understand little of what human beings do to one another. But this we can hopefully all understand–the honoring of other people's stories and lives. Here are their stanzas which served as oars to help them get through the worst days any of us can even imagine. This book should be required reading for every human being, especially those who have contributed to this disaster. It testifies to Gazan beauty and love. And hopefully it will also find the honorable young students worldwide who have taken it upon themselves to advocate for justice and equality and the end of occupation and oppression. This book is a triumph after ongoing catastrophe."–Naomi Shihab Nye
"Everyone with any humanity in the face of what is happening in Palestine should read this outstanding collection of poetry. These words emerging from among the ruins of Gaza and from the devastation in the West Bank have an electric immediacy, a burning anger, a sadness over what has been lost, and a graphic sense of time and place which, for some of these poets, is a recording of their last moments of life. It is impossible to read these poems and remain unmoved, impossible not to feel awe for their courage, and impossible not to share their mixed anger and sadness. Like the greatest war poetry, more than any picture, any video, any reportage can, the words of these poets convey the full horror of life under siege. 'One day, everyone will have always been against this, ' Omar El Akkad wrote. Whenever that day comes, this collection will stand as a shining memorial to poets who wrote in unimaginable conditions during the dark time we are living in, when not enough of us were against it to stop it."–Rashid Khalidi
"You Must Live gathers testamentary art miraculously composed, in the midst of genocide, by poets who have borne unspeakable losses, the majority of whom are still within the debris fields of Gaza, survivors now on the precipice of famine, yet with pens in hand, in the ancient tradition of wuquf 'ala al-atlal, 'standing in the ruins' of the beloved. This is Gaza, as reported by the poets who 'sing [war] to sleep' in qasidas and shorter odes, prose poems and meditations, in the sea-rhythms of their forebears, in the hope to 'convince the dead they are still alive' among a people 'sleeping in tents. / More fragile than clouds.' These poems are flares in a terrible darkness, here to show us the way back to our humanity.""–Carolyn Forchéeacute;
"Is great poetry still possible in the twenty-first century? Open this book and read Khaled Juma's 'The Gravedigger, ' written in Gaza in 2024–and you will have your answer, which is yes. This book is filled with poems
