BOOKS WE READ BY SWANA AUTHORS, 2023

I feel like a lot of the progress I made across genre & region last year was lost with my reading habits this year; I spent a lot of time re-reading because of the nature of the writing I was doing, and a lot of time reading Etel Adnan (never a negative). I got laid off in February and am still unemployed, which would make you think I would Read a Lot More, but I didn’t, and even my video game playtime was down from 2022 — I kind of didn’t really do that much of anything besides watch Supernatural (cringe). After many writers showed their asses about Palestine in October, I’ve felt a wave of nausea each time I pick up a collection and do not know if I’m spending time with the work of someone condones genocide. Normal things? Despite it all, I read around 20 books by SWANA authors, and 60ish overall (mostly poetry, as usual). May next year bring more opportunity for a clear head. — Summer

Last year Samia was a very different person, a very different reader. This is largely because I was only in grad school for the last few months of 2022 versus all of 2023, but also because this year was personally and collectively hard and reading was often a lot tougher to manage than I expected. My reading was a lot less comprehensive, a lot less intentional, mostly driven by what I had easy access to when I felt like picking up a novel, and a lot less overall. Still, I read 30 books this year, 12 of them by SWANA authors, and I must say I loved almost all of them, so there’s that at least! I love being a hater as much as the next guy, but I don’t think hate reading can ever make you feel as good as engaging with brilliant, beautiful art. In 2024, may we all give time to the most delectable writing we can get our hands on and resist self-immiseration from reading bad books. Free Palestine, fuck zionism, and have a restful (god, I hope) new year. — Samia

Read 2022 Part I here, 2022 Part II here, and 2021 here.

POETRY

Figment by Leila Chatti

My Leila Chatti collection grows! This chapbook was devastating. It is a book-length poem about the aftermath of a miscarriage made up of grief-laced fragments and alliterative lists; it felt like a different register from Leila’s work that I’ve known thus far, and it’s fucking masterful. I feel like I’m going to be re-reading this throughout the year. — Summer

A book with a hole in it by Kamelya Omayma Youssef

I was sooooooo entranced by this book; it is made up of journal entries over four months where each line is a single fragmented sentence. There’s a really beautiful dual intimacy/distance to the crafting, and after reading at her launch Kamelya destroyed the book (I saw pictures later). It feels like an art book/poetry book. I especially loved the notes? Incredibly comprehensive but conversational, an almost second section of poetry; I modeled them when writing the notes for my own chapbook. — Summer

Sea and Fog by Etel Adnan

It’s actually nice to write about this book months and months after the fact of reading it; I loved it, so so intensely, but it is with this distance that I realize the incredibly trajectory it set me on in my writing for the rest of the year. I ended up using a passage from it as an epigraph for my chapbook, a fun link between my reading practice and my obsessive pop-culture poetry. Most of what I have written this year since sending in the final draft of my chapbook have been poems to Etel Adnan about the various things I like to watch, read, or listen to — this was not necessarily the inciting incident for that, but it did set some groundwork. — Summer

The Way of the Earth by Matthew Shenoda

I picked up this book when Summer and I saw Matthew read at the LA Times Festival of Books! He was incredible, though I wish I could’ve heard him read all of these poems, since they really feel like they want to be experienced out loud. I don’t read a lot of nature poems so I felt like I was reading with just a lot of curiosity, but I ended up feeling very fulfilled by this book. It’s a really wonderful collection on grief, violence, and nature, all things which I find myself in conversation with a lot these days, so I know I’ll look back to these poems again soon! I’ll definitely be checking out his other collections too. — Samia

Figment by Leila Chatti

What a masterful and delicate little chapbook. I know Leila Chatti loves the abecedarian and this is such an interesting engagement with the form, not being restricted by it but also allowing for the playfulness of the abecedarian or the simplicity of the list form to exist alongside such a deep emotional engagement in the poetry. This book is such a brilliant study of form, space on the page, movement, and language all in a small space and I know I’ll return to it often. — Samia

The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan

I have a confession: before this year I had never read a book of poetry by Hala Alyan. I’ve read many of her poems — in fact, I’ve scoured the internet to read as many as I could because I didn’t have any of her poetry books. And as long time readers of the list will know, I read both of her novels last year. But I’ve never actually read one of her books of poetry, and I needed to rectify that because she is truly one of my favorite writers in any genre. This summer I took a journey to a magical outdoor bookstore in Ojai, CA (Bart’s Books!) and it was exactly what I dreamed it would be. One thing that really surprised me was how good and robust the poetry section was (by which I mean how many SWANA poets they had — I saw many beloved books!!) Anyway, after a long deliberation over which books to buy I landed on this book and Crush by Richard Siken, another book I’ve basically read vicariously through the internet (I was on Tumblr in the early 2010s) and have been wanting to own forever. I thought both of them might provide me with inspiration this summer as I worked on my chapbook draft. And I was right! They pair incredibly well together for all sorts of reasons, one big one being how beautifully both poets write long poems and prose or prose adjacent poems. There’s something very liberating in their tone, in their directness, but also the vividness and viscerality of the scenes they craft. It makes sense to me why I love Alyan’s fiction so much, because her poetry is also a deep study of narrative and prose. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a new favorite poetry book, and a text I plan to study religiously. — Samia

Hijra by Hala Alyan

I did a lot of rereads this year because I was writing a column that required me to write about books I’d (probably) already read, but I do a semi-regular re-read of this book anyway; Hijra is probably one of the most important books in the world to me? Not to be dramatic? But I wrote my senior thesis mostly on it, and it was the first collection by a Palestinian that I really engaged with on a critical level — whatever pseudo public scholarship/criticism I do these days, I owe to spending time with this book when I was twenty. The opening poem, “Ancestry,” is my favorite First Poem of all time. It feels so perfectly orienting, anchoring, without giving too much away — the motifs threaded throughout the book are present, setting the stage; it’s short but thorough, and feels representative of the poetic voice to come. I find myself writing about First Poems a lot when doing reviews or otherwise engaging with collections — yes, it makes sense to be chronological in your analysis, but I owe a lot of how I think about the function and efficacy of First Poems to “Ancestry”. I wrote about Hijra alongside Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun, sort of building on my thesis (which was about feasting in poetry of Palestinian American women) and trying to think transnationally about war, hunger, the role women play in both. — Summer

Expeditions of Projection by leena aboutaleb

Bestie leena released a chapbook this year!!!!! It’s very good, she is the best. I interviewed her about it for Poetry Online; I also blurbed it, which I’ll repeat here, since it’s like. You know, how I feel! “This collection is a rush; Leena’s poems are text message & confession, love letter & manifesto, the vulnerable the political the beautiful all at once.” — Summer

Like We Still Speak by Danielle Badra

Another re-read! I wrote about this book on our 2021 list; I meant to write about it but didn’t. Still a masterclass in the contrapuntal, still a devastating ode to family, still one of my favorite books on grief. — Summer

I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem trans. Sara Elkamel

Reviewed this one! Am I allowed to say this is the most I’ve ever been paid for a review? Reviewing a work in translation, especially poetry, is very hard and strange — I read it alongside my mom so I could better catch the intricacies from the Arabic. I think every translated poetry collection should be a bilingual edition with the original on one side. — Summer

There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and Other by Etel Adnan

Maybe the first time I’ve read Etel Adnan and thought I guess not everything can be a hit…which feels blasphemous to say, but I didn’t connect with this one. I can’t really tell you what it was exploring, especially months after the fact? There’s this really delicate space, I think, between incomprehension that stokes your curiosity and wonder, and incomprehension that keeps you from being able to engage with a text; I wasn’t really able to find a way into this, but the thing is…I will reread it. And probably eat my words! — Summer

Your Blue and the Quiet Lament by Lubna Safi

White Blight by Athena Farrokhzad trans. Jennifer Hayashida

So the thing is, most of the things I read this year, I often wrote about — these two, together! — Summer

These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit by Hayan Charara

Hayan’s poetry is so special; I’ve only read one of his other collections, Something Sinister, but I really loved it. I know he’s really important to a lot of people who are important to me, and so I have a nice little parasocial relationship brewing when I spend time with his poems — and I definitely see the traces of his influence in others, too. He carries humor and tenderness so elegantly, with a very careful translation towards critique or anger or grief. The cover is one of the most beautiful poetry book covers ever, also. — Summer

We Call To the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage edited by Hala Alyan & Zeina Hashem Beck

I’m not one to read anthologies from cover-to-cover, but I interviewed Zeina and Hala about putting together this collection, so figured I should. It was really rewarding! I get into really antsy moods where the only thing that can really soothe my anxious attention is writing that feels like cold water — soothing but sharp. Etel Adnan is a writer that nearly always helps, but there’s a level of focus I can’t always bring myself to when I am in those moods. In the past two months, especially, as Gaza continues to be bombarded and I feel so skeptical of — or outright hurt by — writers I’ve otherwise enjoyed, it’s difficult to sit easy and just read without my brain wandering into the worst of places. This anthology sort of attacks all of those problems — it’s a beautiful curation, mix of established and emerging writers, those based in the US and those not, and offers a really generous, expansive definition of the love poem. It’s nice to turn to any page when I feel really dreadfully awful and take a moment to spend time with someone else’s care. — Summer

Shifting The Silence by Etel Adnan

Big surprise here…more Etel Adnan! Since I’ve been out of work for basically the whole year, I had to get strict with myself when it came to buying books — unfortunately, going to bookstores is one of the main activities of spending time with any of my friends anywhere in the country, and so my rule was before any trip I could write a list of what I was allowed to buy. Any Etel Adnan I did not already own was on that list, and so when I found Shifting the Silence next to Journey to Mount Tamalpais…there you go. It’s one of her last (is her last?) publication before she died, a very fitting collection to place in the middle of my voracious run through her works; what a gift it is, to be able to read through such a beautiful life and mind. 95 years and reflecting. — Summer

A Theory of Birds by Zaina Alsous

Another re-read! I am writing about this book currently. Zaina is one of the greats, I think. Every time I re-read this collection I come away with a new favorite poem — now, it’s “cinematography”; an excerpt:

On my browser, an article about lost cinemas.

Two bulldozed in the West Bank in less than a year.

In the demolished projection room of Al-Assi, live

Remnants of yellow frames. Marx and this poem fail

To fully explain the action of workers watching film alive

Under occupation. Poetry and film survive as incomplete

Forms of description. A vaccine of distance.

I’ve actually read this book three times this year, so you know. Big recommendation. Essay to come. — Summer

The Arab Apocalypse by Etel Adnan

This was the first Etel Adnan collection I purchased — found it at a used bookstore in Berkeley when I was 19, maybe. I’ve read excerpts of it in other settings — workshops, essays, etc, but never all the way through, never on my own. It felt appropriate to read while another Arab apocalypse is occurring. My grief has been so heavy; it’s been very difficult to read and comprehend the way I normally do, and so turning to something beyond legibility — like much of Etel Adnan’s work — feels like a more apt way to process language and the world in general. I cried a lot, a lot. I am writing about it. — Summer

The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan

My life as a critic kind of led up to this moment — getting to read a Hala book months before it is out! It’s really fucking good, maybe her best collection yet? There are some formal experiments I find really rewarding — a sort of choose-your-own adventure poem that, when I first saw it in a magazine, didn’t super land for me, but definitely add to the experience of the book. Neary every poem in the first 40 pages made me cry. I am very tender. We share a pub date! March 12, 2024. — Summer

I could die today and live again by Summer Farah

Our very own Summer Farah has a very real very wonderful book coming out (out March 12 — preorder now)!! I got a sneak preview of this chapbook earlier this year when it was just a google doc and am so excited to read it again, hold it in my hands, pore over the beautiful form of the poems on the page and the amazing cover, etc. I’ve watched this project develop over the years and have always been so in awe of the way Summer’s mind works, how she blends the persona poem with the intensely personal perspective, and how she employs so many exciting forms in ways that feel so effortless. I am constantly inspired by her work and I know everyone else who reads this will be too! The fan poetics revolution is upon us! — Samia

FICTION

If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga

Long time readers of the list will recognize If an Egyptian as one of Summer and my favorite books of last year. I reread this to write a paper on it for one of my classes and I don’t have a ton more to say about it other than what I’ve already written in previous lists (and everything I wrote in my paper) but this just continues to be one of the most striking and inventive works of literature I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read it yet what are you waiting for!!! — Samia

The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine

After a long semester I desperately needed to get back into novels that I don’t have to write papers about and this book, which I’ve had sitting on my bookshelf for almost a year, was perfect. Rabih Alameddine’s prose is truly some of my favorite. He’s always so sharp and funny but also writes about deep emotional pain in such a tender way. Overall I would say I liked this one less than the previous two that I’ve read of his, but I still really enjoyed it and it had a couple absolutely stunning moments that really stuck with me. This was also a very quick read compared to his other two, not because it’s less complex but just because it covers a shorter period and tells a fairly contained story. I also loved the weird meta moments in this with the self-referential writer character. A beautiful book! — Samia

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher

Omg this book was sooo stunning. The details were just great like I loved the family tree choices in this book (design and how it gets revealed over time instead of just as an up front guide like most books). I think the magical realism in this novel was on the whole super successful. Especially the choices about skin later in the book which really push you into a space of constant questioning — Is it real?? Is it metaphor?? Who knows! Besides that I also just think this is a really wonderful exploration of family centered around women and queer lineage. This is a book that really leaves you with a lot to wonder about in its aftermath which I think made the ending feel a bit sudden in places, but it’s also not trying to answer all of your questions or resolve tension and narrative neatly. There were a few pieces of magical realism introduced towards the end that felt less developed for me than some of the other speculative elements that had longer to weave into the narrative, but that’s a small thing and may just be my personal reading. The prose in this novel is so rich and it took me a while to read because it’s the kind of book you want to read carefully and intentionally to pick up all the details. I’m so excited for more people to read this one because I think it’s taking up some super important threads in SWANA fiction (storytelling, magical realism, etc.) and developing its own path through them that builds up feminist and queer modes of storytelling. It reminded me a lot in some ways of Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati (a book I love!!) but if it were told matrilineally rather than patrilineally. Overall such an exciting debut from Sarah Cypher! — Samia

Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas

I really didn’t know what to expect from this book. I couldn’t quite tell going in if it was intended as mystery-leaning litfic or a novel about war and Sudanese history, or something else entirely, but as soon as I started reading I was totally engrossed in this story. The writing is straightforward and compelling, and I really loved reading a story in multi-POV, something I think is honestly really lacking in litfic!! I can understand how drifting between 5 characters might feel like it only allows for a gloss of their interiority, but Abbas’s storytelling is really effective and contained — literally because it is so contained to the space of the compound in a way that really captured, to me, the sense of being stuck there in forced proximity and forced relation while the world and war is quickly encroaching. This book is super devastating at times and delves into war and displacement without shying away from the realities of violence in many forms. Something else I found interesting about this book (though this may have come from me missing something early on) is that it really doesn’t seem to be situated in a particular moment in historical time until the end. The mapping project of the NGO becomes tied up in this complex relationship to time, as the characters come to understand that the landscape is never fixed and is constantly being reshaped by forces ranging from nomadic movement to civil war and climate change. There’s a lot to grapple with in this story, and I’d certainly recommend it. Another excellent debut! — Samia

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

By far the most delightful thing that happened to me this year was getting an ARC of this book (thank you Summer for your Serious Reviewer™ skills), a book I have been literally buzzing about since it was announced. I need to say up front that it is every bit as wonderful and magical and charming and profound as you think it will be. Of course, I am famously biased and a Kaveh Akbar fanatic, but not every great poet is or can be a great novelist, and many poets’ novels have utterly let me down, so I want to be clear that when I say I love this book I mean that I LOVE this book and can’t wait for more people to read it when it comes out in January. There are many things that I could say about why I love this novel. The humor in the writing made me laugh like a dear friend makes you laugh. The book’s relationship to poetry (and performance) is provocative and engaging but not overdone. But perhaps the most exciting thing for me was that this book has a plot and an active one at that. Many poets writing novels can, I think, get caught up in the poetic fascination with language without attending as much as the novel demands to narrative. But when a poet novelist leans into both narrative and language, that’s where the magic happens. This is a book that loves storytelling just as much as it loves the words those stories are told with. I would recommend this to anyone who loves Kaveh’s poetry or who loves eccentric novels in the vein of Zain Khalid’s Brother Alive. — Samia

Koolaids: The Art of War by Rabih Alameddine

This is my fourth Rabih Alameddine novel(ish) and I truthfully do not think I was in the right headspace to give this a fair shot. Like all of his work it’s a fascinating and often really exciting book with all sorts of beautiful, haunting, funny insights, but it’s formally much more disjointed than any of his other works (saying a lot because he loves to move back and forth between multiple stories) and much harder to follow. I also took a very long break in the middle which certainly didn’t help with my overall comprehension, so I think to be fair I would need to give it another read. In some ways I think this is actually his least speculative/magical realist work that I’ve read so far, despite having certain speculative elements — they’re just much more set apart from the narrative. I felt like I got the story a bit more when I went back to some reviews which track the many different characters, so if I reread I will definitely start with an overview. But also, last night I watched Divine Intervention by Elia Suleiman which was absurd and wonderful and it reminded me a lot of this book so perhaps the better way to read it might be to lean into the ways in which it resists comprehension. — Samia

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

When I started this book I thought it would be a bit of a slower read, but once I began reading it it suddenly came very quickly and I finished it much faster than I’ve finished a book in a long time. I think a lot of that is that the characters are very well developed, the dialogue engaging, and the community it depicts very complex and real. This novel follows a Palestinian woman who has been living in the UK and working as a theater actress who returns to Palestine for the first time in a long time. While staying with her sister in Haifa, she somehow gets roped into acting in an Arabic language production of Hamlet in the West Bank. I especially liked the depictions of this group of actors she joins and the layers to their personalities and tensions. Hammad does some interesting work connecting the narrative Hamlet to the Israeli occupation and to national liberation struggles- though I sort of wish there were more of this! I love the freedom of alternative interpretations, the unfinished ruminations on arts and politics, and the precision of language she engages throughout the book. This book is generally very Lit Fic if you’re into that sort of thing (I am), but also toys with the form of the play in ways that I think are sometimes more successful than others. I also enjoy the sister and family relationships depicted in this novel. I would recommend this if you like Hala Alyan’s novels! — Samia

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This book has been vaguely on my list for years, but I finally picked it up after a former professor recommended it; I loved it! It follows two time-agents Red and Blue who move through space/time/universes to make changes on behalf of their respective empires, at war with one another — they are always sort of Just Missing one another, leaving little notes. And then they fall in love!!!!!!!!!! The letter-writing in this is SO BEAUTIFUL and romantic and made me feel so sappy and warm. The writing of the plottier bits is a little more rough and not as fun, sorry, but the ROMANCE! I read it in two sittings, one of which was on BART to San Francisco after a very long time of not taking BART to San Francisco…felt good, felt natural, reading a beautiful novel on public transit. — Summer

Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad

This book was really beautiful in so many ways and more plot-driven than many novels I’ve read recently. I tore through this in one long sitting mostly because I felt a deep concern for the characters and wanted to know how things turned out for them. Some of this story is unsettling (as it should be!). It takes you through a dangerous landscape for our main character(s) navigating anti-Arab/Muslim policing and surveillance structures as well as patriarchal hyper-attention on young women’s bodies and existence. And it also has moments of deep, complicated, beautiful familial love. Some of the plot points felt like they dragged a bit and I sometimes found the dialogue a bit frustratingly indirect (though this is also probably a function of the violences the characters endure), but on the whole this was a fun/sad/sweet read. This book was heavier than I expected, but ultimately a compelling portrait of the wonders and struggles of Arab-American and Muslim-American life. — Samia

OTHER

Nayra and the Djinn by Iasmin Omar Ata

I tried to read more graphic novels this year and what a pleasure it is to be able to include this one by my buddy Delta!!!!!!! I loooooved the colors, soooo bright and fun, set the tone for the story so beautifully. — Summer

Journey to Mount Tamalpais by Etel Adnan

This book inspired a level of obsession in me that can only be measured by my 2012-hystericallonelyteenager Supernatural phase, or alternatively my 2023-unemployed sadloseradult Supernatural phase; I’d wanted to read it for a while but never got into it with the internet archive versions. Finally, found the new-in-print version in a bookstore while I was in the bay area and had a spiritual moment; pretty much every poem I’ve written since July has been because of this book, Etel, and her mountain. — Summer

Where Black Stars Rise by Nadia Shammas and Marie Enger

Horror is not really my genre but after reading this I thought, OK maybe it is? Just eldritch, maybe? It follows Lebanese therapist Amal Robardin and her first client, Yasmin, who describes being visited by a spookycreepy presence — and it’s real! I love the color palette of this book so much, the yellows and the deep blueishblack are so sharp and eerie together. Nadia is one of my favorite people to talk to about being #crazy, and so reading work that engages so carefully and seriously with mental health issues and its relationship to diaspora is grounding — I don’t think I realized how appropriate the genre was for this type of exploration until now. — Summer

On Zionist Literature by Ghassan Kanafani trans. Mahmoud Najib

I’ve been reading this book pretty slowly over the course of the past year, but felt a more urgent need to finish it finally back in October — maybe obvious reasons! This book makes me want to be a different critic. I spend a lot of time focusing on what I think is good (this list is an obvious indicator of that, as I rarely finish books I do not think are good.) Criticism doesn’t pay much and I am a sick person that wants to be energized by the work I spend my time with, but then I see how instrumental literary Zionism was to the creation of Israel and I feel differently. It is a matter of life or death. I will always be learning new things about the before and after of the nakba; my belief in art is always slipping. Sometimes it feels like the only life-changing art is the kind that poisons us rather than saves us, and so maybe criticism can diagnose it before it takes effect. I read about one literary studies book per year, and I’m really thankful this is the one I spent my time with. Easy, quick, life-changing. — Summer

In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country by Etel Adnan

I first read this book in 2021, finishing it the day before Etel Adnan died. I’ve been thinking about it pretty much constantly off and on since, recommending it and recommending it and recommending it, reading excerpts every once in a while, but I finally re-read it in full so I could write a little blurb about it for a year-end list. My feelings have not changed; it is one of the books I think everyone should read before they die. Witness, guilt, grief; the themes still hold. It is beautiful. I miss her. — Summer