"Batool Abu Akleen was having lunch in the seaside apartment that has become the latest refuge for her family of seven, when a missile struck a nearby cafe. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza City. I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window shook, she says. Within an instant, dozens of men, women and children were dead, in an atrocity that was reported around the world."
"At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza's most vivid and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won accolades from the novelist Anne Michaels, the playwright Caryl Churchill and the poet Hasib Hourani, among others. She has thrown her whole being into finding a language for the unspeakable, one capable of articulating its surrealism and absurdity as well as its daily tragedies. In her poems, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, fleetingly referencing both the US's role and its history of annihilation; an ice-cream vendor sells frozen corpses to dogs; a woman wanders the streets, carrying the dying city in her arms and trying to buy a secondhand ceasefire (she can't, because the price keeps going up)."
Batool Abu Akleen survived a missile strike while having lunch in a seaside Gaza City apartment that shelters her family of seven. At 20 years old, she writes debut poetry that transforms personal and collective trauma into vivid, surreal imagery: Apache helicopters firing missiles, frozen corpses sold to dogs, a woman carrying the dying city and attempting to buy a secondhand ceasefire. The collection, titled 48Kg, contains 48 poems representing kilograms of the poet's weight; she frames the poems as part of her flesh. A close friend, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike this spring.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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