Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance

April 2, 2018
Poet, translator, and physician Joudah (Textu) balances cool scientific precision with exceptional openness to mystery and awe in keenly lyrical poems offset by occasional jolts of irony. For Joudah, questions of mortality pervade the daily terrain that he traverses in his writing. As a medical student in anatomy lab, he notes, “I had come across that which will end me, ex-/ tend me, at least once, without knowing it.” Such heightened awareness of human vulnerability suffuses Joudah’s sensibility and informs his approach to all subject matter, which includes considerations of war and displacement, as well as tender exchanges between lovers. There is also playfulness in how Joudah turns the material of contemporary life toward timeless qualities of being: “our polymers of I skipping/ their archipelago stones// Your touchscreen/ my ringtone heart.” Interdependence is evident everywhere, as is the knowledge that “A body exits all pages to be/ inscribed on another, itself.” From this place of shared fragility, Joudah asks, “Sweet clot/ of wakefulness, what is Mercy?” He answers his own question: “To go mad among the mad/ or go it alone.” Joudah’s collection is testament to another state of being in which each poem is an occasion to be awake to the world with clarity and compassion.

May 15, 2018

"If only/ reality didn't lay siege to my head," writes 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets winner Joudah in his fourth collection (after Textu), "I'd celebrate existence." And certainly the immediacy of Joudah's experiences as an ER physician and with Doctors Without Borders in Africa have given him an intimate, complex perspective on mortality one doesn't often find among poets, an apprehension whose hard-won clarities must struggle through a delirium of contradiction and paradox, of unbidden thoughts that collide and coalesce, only to separate again: "Some climbing is ascension/ some is collapse." Here the dead and the living coexist, and all share a sense of displacement and uncertainty in a landscape "where one is bound to no place in the first place" and where "sorrow has bones." VERDICT Difficult, serious, and probing, Joudah's surreal lyrics rarely reveal their mysteries on a first or even fifth reading but instead are discovered like fragmented dreams that suddenly become whole when recollected months afterward.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.