Alight

Starred review from June 24, 2013
“Our age is a checkpoint” writes Joudah (winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets) in his second collection. These deeply unsettling poems draw from Joudah’s work as a physician with Doctors Without Borders, evoking the fight for survival through enjambed lines that lack punctuation. Inefficient bureaucracy and preventable death haunt these lines: “I was trying to listen to your baby’s heartbeat/ With a gadget a century old.” The violence in the collection proves bipartite: political unrest the land is subject to, “Where the rebels came and went/ And ran into the government boys// Her girl’s femur the size of the bullet,” and the violence of illness resulting from lack of medical care. Even the animal kingdom is inflected through this lens, “caterpillars that eat their mothers and taxed pronouns.” Joudah conveys suffering without foregoing lyricism, unearthing striking linguistic combinations—“Humvee probability,” “pregnant mistletoes”—that enact a physician’s precision and a poet’s descriptive prowess. The winding nature of these poems suggests the lasting nature of the struggle described, the lack of resolution or reprieve: “To seduce memory/ into song/ to twist it/ in a twister county,” “To pray surrounded by guards/ to pray to the guards or/ to the invisible gods in the guards or the one surrounding the guards.”

May 15, 2013
Raised abroad by Palestinian parents, Joudah returned to his native Texas to practice medicine and compose poetry. When Louise Glck selected his debut, The Earth in the Attic (2008), for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, she recognized its subjects as characterized by crisis and transience and alluded to Joudah's desire to suture the disjointed experience of exile. Here Joudah continues to examine the role his dual vocations play in his own sense of ancestral displacement, and he moves as easily from a Moorish synagogue in Prague to Gaza's colonial groves, rows of eucalyptus trees / The British had planted. With anatomical precision, Joudah illustrates scenes that are at once uncanny and contemporary, be it a Bedouin woman's lavender mourning veil, the chrome doors to an alchemist's home, or the mysterious speaker in Smoke, who exits abruptly and claims to have scripts to write and scrolls to find, a testament to the duties of attending physician and displaced poet alike. In both roles, Joudah has records to keep and history to revisit, and does so beautifully.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)