ABOUT THE POEM BY

GEORGE ABRAHAM

This poem takes formal inspiration from both Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and Tarik Dobbs’s Dragphrasis poem and installation work. Some lines reference works by Kamelya Omayma Youssef and Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and the final page includes screenshots from Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie-Rose. The piece is a response to contemporary interfaces of Arab-ness, American-ness, and homophobia, recalling recent events such as protests of LGBTQ books in Dearborn, an Arab American Today article with a headline about a “homosexual intifada,” and more broadly, the rise of homophobic hate crimes in the US settler state, including the Club Q mass shooting in Colorado Springs. I was moved by the challenges posed by Rebecca Johnson and Hannah Feldman, at the end of a seminar on Modernism and Decoloniality, to think critically about what forms of discourse are deemed “acceptable” by institutions, and how artistic and poetic form can intervene in failures of language (from inter-communal contexts to broader institutional and state apparatuses).

وه

George Abraham (they/ ) is a Palestinian American poet. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers, and a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, The Arab American National Museum, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, National Performance Network, and more. They are currently co-editing a Palestinian global anglophone poetry anthology with Noor Hindi (Haymarket Books, 2024) and are a Litowitz MFA+MA student at Northwestern University.