Chaos, Crossing

Olivia Elias (trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid)

Chaos, Crossing – translated by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid – is a powerful chronicle of uprootedness, of times marked by inequality, injustice, and disconnection. These poems--presented here in a bilingual edition--seek the calm at the center of the storm, the still point amidst the chaos.

'Olivia Elias, child of the Nakba, is a world citizen, resident at one time or another of Lebanon, Canada, France. But as a poet, she remains a Palestinian, inhabited by the landscape, the language, creating lyrics that speak the sorrow of displacement, and a memory vaster and deeper than any one woman's, with a restraint that dignifies both grief and rage. Abu-Zeid has beautifully recreated these poems in English, becoming, as Abdelfattah Kilito put it, one of the author's doubles, and bringing Anglophone readers a necessary and unique Palestinian voice.' – Marilyn Hacker

'I started making a list of lines from Olivia Elias's Chaos, Crossing, but the list grew so large that it was clear to me that this is no ordinary collection of poems. One has first to lose faith in words, these poems suggest, then grapple with each word, each line break, their placement on the page, in order to regroup them. Kareem James Abu-Zeid's translation conveys Elias's tension and urgency, asking us to stop at each word and to approach one of her central questions: is it possible that too much rage kills rage?' – Ahmad Almallah, author of Bitter English