rock flight

Narrative poetry centered on the violent occupation of Palestine

Hasib Hourani’s debut collection, rock flight, is a book-length poem that follows personal and historical narrative centered on the violent occupation of Palestine. Searing and fierce, tender and pleading, rock flight moves between poetry and prose, historical events and meditations on language to create a vital interactive reading experience.

rock flight is a book-length poem that follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.

‘rock flight is relentlessly potent. Merging resistance and poetry, Hasib Hourani writes back—against the “suffocating state” and imperial forces. Be ready to be transformed by Hourani’s diasporic anticolonial poetics.’ — Don Mee Choi

‘Here is a poetry of passion; a poetry of necessity; a poetry of survival, and a poetry-triumphant.’ — Maxine Beneba Clarke