Alaa Alqaisi —

There are cities that fall all at once and cities that fall slowly, but Gaza is neither. Gaza falls repeatedly, in cycles that erase and then erase again, each collapse more total than the one before. It is a geography of vanishing, of absence becoming permanent. A house is struck, and then its memory is struck too. A hospital crumbles, and with it the records of those who were healed or lost there. The world becomes harder to name. Streets disappear, and language follows. Even grief loses its bearings when the mourner has no grave to return to.

And still, there are voices. In the absence of everything else, writing remains. Not because it is safe to write, and certainly not because there is time or quiet or shelter for it, but because without writing, there would be nothing left that resembles continuity. Words arrive not after the devastation but within it. They emerge from beneath collapsed ceilings, in crowded tents, on phones held together with tape. They are shaped by interruption and scarcity, but they are not silenced by them. The act of writing in Gaza is not a metaphor for survival. It is not even survival itself. It is how one continues to be heard even as they begin to disappear.

This review brings together four recent works authored by Palestinian writers enduring the ongoing genocide in Gaza—each written originally in Arabic and recently published in English. The books gathered here are not written from a distance. They are not recollections. They are immediate, sometimes breathless, sometimes painfully composed. They speak not toward clarity but into fire. Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece by Nasser Rabah is composed of enigmatic poems that move like shadows across a scorched wall. Letters from Gaza, edited by Mahmoud Alshaer and Mohammed al-Zaqzooq, gathers voices suspended in midair, letters that are as much elegies as they are confessions. 48Kg by Batool Abu Akleen offers a memoir of weight, both physical and emotional. Voices of Resilience, written by four women displaced by war—Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid—documents days that cave inward, written in real time against the threat of erasure.

There is no single form that binds these books together, no common style to contain their voices. One writes in fragments, another amid bombardment. One weeps in metaphor, another names the dead without ornament. What unites them is not structure or tone but the urgency of bearing witness in a world that has already turned its face away. These are not works shaped by peace or written in the quiet after tragedy. They are born in the breathless hours, in shelters, in exile, in the absence of light. They write as buildings fall. They remember as bodies vanish. And in doing so, they carve a mark deeper than rubble, a mark that says: We existed, we spoke, and even when everything conspired to silence us, we wrote.


Mahmoud Alshaer and Mohammed al-Zaqzooq, eds., Letters from Gaza, trans. by the ArabLit Translation Collective (New York: Penguin, 2025).

In the ravaged literary terrain of Gaza, Letters from Gaza arrives less as a conventional book and more as a living document of wartime testimony. It is a collection of 30 pieces—letters, poems, and short reflections—written in Arabic by Palestinians across Gaza during the ongoing genocide and rendered into English by a diverse team of translators. The texts range across age, gender, and geography, moving between Rafah, Khan Younis, and the shelters of Gaza City. Some are lyrical, others stripped of ornament; some are composed with literary flair, while others barely manage coherence under bombardment. What unites them is shared urgency: to speak while the self still exists. Alshaer, a poet, curator, and cultural organizer deeply involved in Gaza’s literary life, and al-Zaqzooq, a writer, editor, and researcher, do not assemble a curated narrative here. Rather, they excavate a form of testimony that survives through rupture. This is not literature polished for the page. It is literature torn from it, urgent, unfinished, and defiantly present.

What distinguishes this volume is its refusal of narrative closure. There is no arc of redemption, no progression toward clarity. Instead, the letters inhabit what might be called “the persistence of beginnings,” a structure that echoes Edward Said’s insights about geography as a socially constructed and maintained sense of place.¹ These are not letters that unfold, but restart, stammer, vanish, reappear. The condition of the writer mirrors that of the city: interrupted, uncertain, and in transit. “Day 24 bids itself farewell,”² one entry begins, compressing time and absence, marking chronology not as progress but as attrition. “It begins with the morning heat glowing in the tent and ends with the biting cold at night,”³ another voice admits, allowing cold to speak louder than metaphor.

The formal architecture of the book rests loosely on the epistolary, but the genre unravels under pressure. Not every piece begins with “Dear,” nor do they always end with a signature or resolution. Some letters are addressed to Gaza itself, some to lost family members, others drift unmoored. The letters become increasingly unstable containers for pain that exceeds the grammar of address. “My health is good, but I feel severe pain in my left thigh—the same place she used to sleep in,”⁴ one writer notes, blurring the line between bodily and emotional laceration. The addressee is no longer stable, because neither is the ground.

The emotional terrain of the book is uneven by necessity. Some voices tremble with raw grief. Others are clear-eyed, observational, even strangely restrained. What binds them is not coherence but urgency. One person writes: “I see small children, wrapped in their shrouds. My senses harden. Their shy tears fall; I cry on their behalf.”⁵ In these lines, grief detaches from its source and migrates into the writer, who becomes both witness and surrogate. The children no longer cry for themselves; it is the adult who carries the weeping. This transference enacts the breakdown of generational order, where mourning arrives too early and language must absorb what the body cannot.

Translation, here, does not smooth over trauma. It carries the fracture forward. The work of the translators does not domesticate these texts for English readers; it delivers them with their jagged breath intact. The translators approached each letter not as a polished literary artifact but as a fragile utterance pulled from ruin. The syntax falters where the original did. The pauses feel deliberate, like spaces left where a name once was. The translation honors that fear by refusing to stylize what should remain broken. This is a literature that resists fluency. It demands to be read with attention, with humility, with an awareness that what is being received is not a finished message but a cry.

Letters from Gaza does not monumentalize the writer or elevate pain into metaphor. It allows pain to remain granular, domestic, and unresolved. It is not a literary response to catastrophe. It is catastrophe archived in language. There is no reconstruction, no narrative balm. What the book builds, instead, is an echo chamber, where absence is named and allowed to remain unhealed.


Batool Abu Akleen, 48Kg., trans. Batool Abu Akleen, Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher (London: Tenement Press, 2025).

Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg. is a bilingual poetry collection organized around the poet’s own diminishing body under siege. A twenty-year-old Palestinian poet and translator, Abu Akleen stands among a generation of emerging writers reshaping Gaza’s literary terrain in 2024, not by chronicling destruction from a distance but by writing from within its wounds. Her work diverges from established male-authored war narratives that have historically defined Palestinian resistance. Instead, 48Kg. stages a feminist reorientation: a poetics of visceral embodiment, physical diminishment, and affective disintegration under siege. Where prior literary icons mythologized the land or the martyr, Abu Akleen scales Gaza down to the weight of a starving female body. Her poetics are granular, skeletal, and radically intimate.

48Kg. is not merely a title but a structuring device. Each poem is named for a declining weight—48Kg, 47Kg, and so on—transforming the body into a site of measurement and testimony. The architecture of the book is deliberately skeletal: spare verses, minimal punctuation, abrupt line breaks. The effect is not aesthetic minimalism but physiological urgency. Hunger is not abstract here; it becomes the formal logic underwriting the text.

The language is severe, elliptical, and often surreal. In one of the early poems, the speaker confesses, “I pick fresh hearts from the street / the most defeated ones,” rendering grief both grotesque and devotional. The body becomes a terrain of improvisation, where cooking, dreaming, and mourning merge into hybrid rituals. The absence of punctuation throughout the text mirrors the collapse of structure in siege-life. Sentences fracture like walls. Meaning stumbles and reassembles across enjambments.

Central to this work is the gendered experience of survival. Unlike heroic, masculine renderings of martyrdom or battle, Abu Akleen’s voice inhabits the soft infrastructures of war—kitchens, beds, toilets, menstrual blood. In the poem “Judgment Day,” she writes: “Gabriel hasn’t blown into his trumpet yet / how did the resurrection happen?”⁶ Her irony isn’t performative. It’s the confusion of a survivor who no longer trusts the calendar of catastrophe. Time in 48Kg. is erratic. Space is claustrophobic. Bodies vanish incrementally rather than explosively. This is a literature not of spectacle but of slow erasure.

In dialogue with other 2024 Gazan texts, such as Letters from Gaza, where collective testimony dominates, Abu Akleen’s singular voice is a rupture. Where Letters archives the many, 48Kg. commits to the irreducible complexity of one. Its formal refusal of narrative cohesion contrasts with the epistolary shape of communal grief. The result is a poetics that does not explain Gaza to the world but carves Gaza into the body of language itself.

The English translation channels the raw immediacy of Batool Abu Akleen’s voice, carrying its breathless urgency across languages. The emotional clarity is searing, even as some of the metaphors lose their sonic density in transit. Most of the poems were translated by Abu Akleen herself, in close collaboration with editors Dominic J. Jaeckle and Cristina Viti. In the book’s introduction, she reflects on the act of translating her own work: “In Arabic, I was losing myself; I was afraid of death, afraid that my body might be torn apart without there being anyone there to recollect it… But when I started to translate this book, I made peace with death.”⁷ Through the act of self-translation, Abu Akleen does not simply render her work into another language; she reenters the text, confronting its grief and fear on new terms. The translated poems bear the imprint of this reckoning, each line shaped by a poet who is not only surviving but actively reassembling herself across languages. Rather than standing apart from the collection, the translation forms its interior scaffolding, holding together what threatens to fall apart.


Nasser Rabah, Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, trans. Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, and Khaled Al-Hilli (San Francisco: City Lights, 2025).

Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece is a singular poetic volume forged in the furnace of prolonged siege. Rabah, a novelist and poet born in Gaza in 1963, is a prominent literary voice in the Arab world, whose work predates and transcends the current war. But it is precisely in 2024, amid Gaza’s most catastrophic unmaking, that his voice returns with renewed urgency. Rabah’s poetry is not only a record of war—it is war speaking itself, resisting reduction to statistics or victimhood. It conjures the metaphysical weight of living among ruins.

The book opens with “Prelude,” a poem in which the poet addresses God as the source of his poetic emergence: “O Lord... here’s my soul, done with words, now ripe for the picking.”⁸ The invocation sets the tone for a book steeped in theological cadence and lyrical lament, where the act of writing is itself an act of unburdening and prophecy. Rabah’s poems do not simply describe Gaza, they summon it, sing it, gnash through it. The form is unbound: Long, free-verse lines erupt into metaphysical declarations, surreal digressions, and sudden invocations. His syntax wavers between the mystical and the mundane, as if caught between prayer and graffiti.

This is not a collection that seeks neatness or closure. Instead, it swells with images that collapse boundaries between object and affect. In “Water Thirsty for Water,” he writes: “My void is an old man expelled / from the mercy of the poor and of the alleys, / sculpting time for a drink of water.”⁹ Here, thirst is not only physical but existential; water is not salvation but an unreachable mirage. Rabah’s Gaza is a place where language cannot separate itself from anguish, and yet remains defiantly beautiful.

Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece offers a poetics grounded in immersion rather than escape. Rabah’s language does not attempt to lift the reader above the devastation but walks directly through it, attuned to the textures of brokenness and breath—and of life. The poems unfold with sensory precision, each image rendered so vividly that grief intensifies the presence of the world rather than obscuring it. Objects, landscapes, even moments of stillness are infused with a startling aliveness. Instead of receding into abstraction, Rabah’s verse holds onto the physical and the tangible, insisting that attention to life’s textures becomes a map of survival.

Formally, the book defies Western lyric conventions. Rabah’s stanzas do not resolve; they stagger, splinter, grieve. There is no symmetry here, only the unruly architecture of trauma. In “A Balcony Hanging in the Sky,” he writes: “I guide the missile mail to my pocket, then I crumble it like an electric bill. I save their ball for the kids for after the war. They might return with no legs.”¹⁰ These lines collapse the ordinary and the apocalyptic, mingling utilities with shrapnel, toys with prosthetics. The poet becomes a custodian of fragments, trying to salvage meaning from obliteration. Rabah is not interested in elegy as closure, he writes elegy as rupture, where the poem itself is both wound and map.

This work functions simultaneously as poetic testimony and political metaphysics. “Who will hoist the children to God before hoisting them onto their cross?” he asks in the same poem—a line that situates Gaza’s dead children not just as victims but as crucified martyrs, unwilling saints in a global drama of abandonment.¹¹ The spiritual charge here is deliberate. Rabah wields theological imagery to indict and to endure. Gaza, in his hands, becomes a stage for moral reckoning.

One of the most powerful shifts in the collection is the disintegration of language itself. In “No Mail for Years,” he writes: “No mail for years, all I find in my hand every morning is merely obscure scattered words, I waste the whole day rearranging them in vain… Not one full sentence or line whets the desire for news I can verify.”¹² Language here becomes detritus, post-blast syntax, insufficient to carry truth. Thematically, the book circles ruins, both physical and psychic. The poems are haunted by loss—of home, of coherence, of memory—and yet they resist disappearance. They write against forgetting. They chant despite the rubble.

Compared to Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg., which documents gendered trauma through corporeal minimalism, Rabah’s voice is metaphysical—is more expansive and even, at times, ironic or mystical. Where Abu Akleen uses silence and sparseness to highlight the female body’s compression, Rabah erupts into allegory and storm. Still, both poets write from the crater. They simply choose different languages to articulate that which remains.

The English translation preserves much of Rabah’s incantatory tone, but inevitably dilutes some of the sonic density and cultural specificity. Still, the rhythm survives. It is uneven, like breath during panic, like walking barefoot through glass. For English-speaking audiences, the poems may read as surreal or cryptic, but that opacity is part of their force. Gaza is not easily narrated. Rabah’s poems do not ask to be understood. They ask to be witnessed. The poem has said its piece—not to explain Gaza but to survive it. And in doing so, it joins a growing literary canon that insists Gaza is not only a site of war but a furnace of art.


Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid, Voices of Resilience: Diaries of Genocide (Manchester: Comma Press, 2025).

In Gaza’s literary landscape of 2024, razed by bombs and haunted by silence, Voices of Resilience: Diaries of Genocide does not merely appear; it emerges like a siren from the wreckage. Coauthored by four women—Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid—this work transcends the frame of a conventional diary. It becomes an unrelenting act of bearing witness from within annihilation. There are no tidy arcs here, no retrospective wisdom. What the book offers instead is unfiltered immediacy: words spoken in the dark, often before the dust has even settled. The form itself—daily entries written from tents, shelters, and bombed-out homes—rejects the privilege of reflection. It is literature forged in real time, amid devastation.

Time in this book is not linear; it is recursive, ruptured and hemorrhaging. The calendar entries do not organize events so much as mourn them. Days do not pass; they bleed into each other. The temporal rhythm of the diary mimics the rhythm of siege: moments repeated, shattered, or suspended. On May 5, Ala’a Obaid records the city erupting in celebration at the rumor of a ceasefire—“Children are running and dancing in the street. Gunfire echoes, and women ululate”¹³—only to have that joy extinguished when news breaks that the truce was rejected. “Everything shrinks,” she writes. “Joy fades. The city’s noise subsides.” This pattern, of hope evaporating mid-sentence, is one the reader comes to recognize. The structure of the book mimics the structure of siege: unpredictable, repetitive, without end.

The emotional tonality of Voices of Resilience is deliberately uneven, and this unevenness is its strength. Some entries pulse with immediacy, written in the middle of sirens. Others whisper from the hollow of exhaustion. But none of the voices retreat into abstraction. They document not just violence but the microtextures of its aftermath—cracked pots, stolen solar panels, the dried blood of a neighbor on the floor. Nahil Mohana’s entry on the exodus from Rafah, as people flee with their furniture strapped to donkey carts, is a vivid study in postapocalyptic domesticity. She notes the necessity of carrying everything, even solar panels—tools of both survival and livelihood—in a world where infrastructure has collapsed. These details are not ornamental; they are indictments. To witness them is to be forced into a confrontation with the engineered nature of Palestinian dispossession.

Sondos Sabra’s writing is where memory meets its disintegration. She anchors her voice in childhood rituals—harvesting olives with her father, brewing tea—but these gentlest images are relentlessly fractured by drones, rubble, and absence. “The smell of gunpowder still lingers in my lungs,”¹⁴ she writes, collapsing nature and war into the same breath. The olive harvest, once a pastoral trope in Palestinian poetry, here becomes an act of defiance and elegy. Her style refuses lyricism even as it touches the lyric; her memories are suspended between love and loss, between land and loss of land. What emerges is not a nostalgic narrative of homeland but an unstable archive, where even beauty is contaminated by ruin.

Batool Abu Akleen’s section is perhaps the most ethically disarming. In one of the book’s most provocative entries, she refuses the performance of public grief. She does not list her dead. She does not describe their final moments. She does not visit their graves. “I laughed and began to imagine my future as if I hadn’t lost them,”¹⁵ she writes. It is not indifference but an unflinching confrontation with the privacy of pain. In a cultural and political landscape where Palestinian death is often consumed for its moral clarity or strategic utility, her refusal to narrate becomes an act of resistance. She does not offer her sorrow for external consumption. Instead, she claims it, isolates it, and shields it. What is being documented here is not just war but the emotional violence of having to narrate one’s own losses over and over again for an audience that may not act.

For the English-speaking reader, the question of access is not solved by translation—it is deepened by it. This is not translation as clarity or fluency; this is translation as rupture. The English does not iron out the jagged Arabic. It leaves the syntax trembling, the breath short, the silences thick. In this way, translation becomes a continuation of the original condition: besieged, partial, gasping. To read Voices of Resilience in English is not to be invited into understanding but into proximity with the untranslatable. It demands that we resist the impulse to make the suffering legible on our own terms. It demands that we sit, uncomfortably, with testimony that does not resolve into narrative, and with grief that insists on remaining private. In doing so, the book transforms both testimony and translation into acts of radical, unyielding presence.

To read these four books together—Letters from Gaza, 48Kg., Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, and Voices of Resilience—is not to gather a collection of traumatic accounts of genocide in real time, nor is it to assemble a coherent literary archive. It is to enter a field of survival literature shaped by the fragmentation of war, the implosion of time, and the dismemberment of space. These texts resist inherited genres. The diary becomes an open wound, the letter a lifeline cast into silence, the poem a shrapnel of breath. What binds these works is not form but condition: the act of writing in the aftermath of shelter, memory, and speech itself.

What thus emerges is a literature that refuses conventional expectations of voice, narrative, or catharsis. Temporal structure collapses under the weight of repetition and rupture. Emotion in these texts does not arc toward healing. Grief is recursive, private, sometimes impolite. This is not a literature of noble suffering. It does not invite pity. It confronts the reader with what survival actually demands: an ethics not of endurance but of presence in the unbearable.

Together, these works transform the reading experience into a political and affective encounter. They demand slowness, discomfort, attention. They urge the reader not to decode but to accompany. Translation, in this context, becomes a form of shared fragility, a decision to carry the brokenness of language across a wound. There is no promise of restoration here, no literary scaffolding to rebuild what was lost. Instead, there is only witness, stubborn, cracked, unfinished. And if I seem to know the texture of this grief too intimately, it is because I write from within it as well—from the same scorched earth these texts emerge from. This is what survival literature looks like when survival sings back through every line, carrying the weight of what cannot be silenced.