An honor spending time with comrades like you and Mia, who's as kind as she is brilliant ♥️ truly thank you all for welcoming me, cannot wait to return to y'all ASAP inshallah!!!

New poems from Margaret Ross, Ben Garcia, and @intifadabatata.bsky.social:
www.thebeliever.net/excerpt-when...

Eternal starlight to Maya Marshall & the lovely folks at Haymarket for supporting me (& many of us) through one of the darkest moments in our history. Thank you to every writer unafraid to an accomplice in our struggle, for re/orienting me every day: I write for you.

My third is to my MFA folks who loved me through the impossible process of writing this book, especially to @tarikd.xyz, without whom this book literally wouldn't exist, as well as my NU profs/cohort & broader chicago community.

My second is to celestial comrade Etel Adnan, with whom my book shares spectral siblinghood: may the job of Arab American poets be one of carrying our ancestors' names into the night as we join them, with all that love asks of us.

My first & truest gratitude is to my people who resist by any means necessary. No ifs ands or buts. You are braver than any poet of empire can ever dream of being.

That I will donate proceeds from this book to Gaza is not enough. That I will continue to reshare & redonate to mutual aid in the region is not enough. By publishing this, I am reflecting the responsibility onto you, reader, asking you to join us & build a new world together

Let me be clear: by bringing this book into the world, I want to bring nothing short of apocalypse, by which I mean, an end to the spiraling death machine of empire that rules over us all. No words of mine can ever be enough, to our kin in Gaza, without our actions to end this genocide.

Maybe that's the contradiction of when the Arab Apocalypse comes to America: it was here all along, but how many of us knew how to digest it, let alone, participate in it?

This book is not enough. I want to start from that place. That poetry as survival is not enough because survival is not enough. That poetry teaching life is not enough when the il/literate entities that murder us are fundamentally antithetical to life.