rock flight

Hasib Hourani

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

‘Poetry’s most captivating speech is the apparatus of colonial and administrative language wickedly turned back on itself. This poetry is wicked: a rock, flung whilst studied, signalling hard, unerring and remarkable.’ – Holly Pester