Pillow Thoughts

Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008) was the poetic voice of the Palestinian people. One of the most acclaimed contemporary poets in the Arab world, he was also a prominent spokesman for human rights who has spent most of his life in exile. In his early work, the features of his beloved land - its flowers and birds, towns and waters - were an integral part of poems witnessing a string of political and humanitarian tragedies afflicting his people. In his most recent books, his writing stands at the border of earth and sky, reality and myth, poetry and prose. Returning to Palestine in 1996, he settled in Ramallah, where he surprised his huge following in the Arab world by writing a book of love, The Stranger's Bed (1998), singing of love as a private exile, not about exile as a public love. A State of Siege (2002) was his response to the second Intifada, his testament not only to human suffering but to art under duress, art in transmutation. The 47 short lyrics of Don't Apologise for What You've Done (2003) form a transfiguring incarnation or incantation of the poet after the carnage. The Butterfly's Burden is a translation of these three recent books, and was awarded the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2008. Mahmoud Darwish died in Houston, Texas, in August 2008 from complications following heart surgery. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas immediately declared three days of national mourning to honour the great Arab writer. Winner of the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Bilingual Arabic-English edition

Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa—she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience. With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, El-Kurd lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism. His poems trace Rifqa’s exile from Haifa to his family’s current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba. El-Kurd’s debut collection definitively shows that the Palestinian struggle is a revolution, until victory.

Composed some time between the middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the important Northern epics and a classic of European literature.
In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work which is both true, line by line, to the original poem, and an expression, in its language and music, of something fundamental to his own creative gift.

From Najwa Zebian—celebrated Lebanese-Canadian poet, speaker, and educator—comes a highly personal and moving second collection.

In The Nectar of Pain, Zebian sheds light on the feelings and experiences that emerge from a painful heartbreak. She writes that the process of cleansing oneself of that pain—day by day, hour by hour, and second by second—is the real work of healing.

With uncommon warmth and wisdom, Zebian empowers all who have lost to let go of anger and transform their suffering into the softness, sweetness, and beauty of nectar. She holds her readers by the hand as they heal.