Book - Out of Gaza

At the beginning of the Fifth Gaza War, the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer defiantly promised that if the Israeli Defence Force attacked his house he would ‘throw my pen in the faces of the soldiers’. A few weeks later, Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike on the building.

In the first three months of the fighting, over 27k Palestinians were killed in Gaza, almost all of them civilians. Four thousand children were killed in the first few weeks of the war. A third of all the houses have been destroyed, together with the water and electricity infrastructure, 300 schools, 26 hospitals and 88 mosques, turning Gaza into what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called a ‘graveyard’.

Out of Gaza brings together responses to the current crisis by fifteen Palestinian poets –

Ali Abukhattab, Refaat Alareer, Hala Alyan, Farid Bitar, Tariq Luthun, Marwan Makhoul,

Mohammed Mousa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Samah Sabawi, Sara M. Saleh, Deema K. Shehabi, Dareen Tatour, Mosab Abu Toha, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.

These are poems of rubble and resilience, death and resistance; about invasion, displacement, occupation, exile and bombardment. Angry with the world’s silence in the face of such tragedy, these poems bear witness to catastrophe and to the powerful determination to survive it.

A percentage of the sales of this book go to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Alan Morrison’s books include A Tapestry of Absent Sitters, Captive Dragons, Blaze a Vanishing, Shadows Waltz Haltingly, Shabbigentile, Gum Arabic, Wolves Come Grovelling and three collections from Smokestack – Keir Hardie Street, Tan Raptures and Anxious Corporals. In 2018 he was joint winner of the Bread & Roses Poetry Prize sponsored by UNITE. He edits the webzine The Recusant and its sister site Militant Thistles.

Atef Alshaer is Senior Lecturer in Arabic and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. His books include A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba, Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World and Love and Poetry in the Middle East: Literature from Antiquity to the Present.