gloomylamp's review against another edition
dark
tense
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, War, and Sexual violence
zeinaj's review against another edition
5.0
Suheir Hammad is the first Palestinian poet I’ve read that truly inspired me, in a modern and feminine sense. Her poem “the necklace”, means so much to me; it’s personal.
woodlandbooklover's review against another edition
3.0
These poems are unapologetic in their criticism of Israel and white America. On the page, they're not very good poems, but they would perform well on a slam stage. It's hard for a poem to do both. Very amusing to see the mid-1990s references in there -- like beepers.
lindsayb's review against another edition
3.0
Good, though having read fabulous Zaatardiva, I appreciate the maturity she grew into, both in content and style.
sarah_who_reads's review
3.0
In general, I really liked this collection by Suheir Hammad, who I generally admire a lot. I love how viscerally she evokes both Palestine and New York. She is unabashed, and I have usually loved her confrontational style; it is, after all, her intention to make us uncomfortable, and that intention is noble. So most of the book was filled with the type of poetry that you want to read and then put down so you can absorb it for a while. But in the middle of the book there is a poem - one stop (hebron revisited) - that crossed a line for me, in that it blurred concepts that should not be blurred, imagining physical violence against Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn-born Israeli settler and extremist who opened fire on Palestinian Muslims praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron during Ramadan in 1994, killing 29 people and injuring another 125. It's not her revenge fantasy about Goldstein that bothered me; he was a specific public figure, an emblem for those who support ethno-religious violence and he's dead and not in danger of being harmed by her writing. Writing is a mechanism by which she's dealing with her overwhelming emotion at his acts. But the imagery she uses in some parts of the poem would be so offensive to most Jews - and in fact, most Christians as well, as she invokes tired historical Christian tropes about Jews - in the way they play on historical narratives of ordinary Jews who are not massacring Muslim worshippers. It might be true that Hammad is getting at the idea of Israel forcing Jews to associate with its policies, but this poem doesn't seem to well support that possible critique. At any rate, otherwise I would have given this book 4 stars, but her sloppiness with her metaphors and imagery in that poem specifically, which doesn't give adequate consideration to the horrifically-iconic nature of such narratives, means I can't bring myself to do it. However, I don't want one poem to overshadow the importance of the other poems in the book, which are definitely brave and important to read. I would still recommend this book.
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