You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine

Sherah Bloor and Tayseer Abu Odeh

Forthcoming September 2025

Bearing witness to the realities of the Palestinian genocide, You Must Live is a bilingual anthology of recent poetry from Gaza and the West Bank. Translated from Arabic and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, this collection gathers the voices of poets currently living in Palestinian territory, most of whom have never left. Yet the poems in You Must Live refuse to cast their speakers as perpetual victims. Diverse voices and styles shine throughout—powerful, prayerful, theatrical, and even humorous—as poets write love letters to the landscape, elegies for martyrs and homes, and proclamations for the future. Negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, You Must Live sounds as an urgent call to the global community.

Paperback: $22 list price

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ISBN: 9781556597206

Format: Paperback

I have never seen a corpse intact
by Waleed al-Aqqad 

I have never seen a corpse intact
but I recognize each of them,
every one of them, every victim.
Even those fingers, I know whose they are.

I saw a body with its head crushed.
I looked into holes in its chest.
Air passed in between bones.
Every day another rib broke from its cage,
and because God created limbs
and combined them, the idea came to me that
God is a masterful artist.

Still, we wanted to hold you. But you were coming apart
into your own blood.
We were scared your face would be changed,
the smile you were known by
lost. We said goodbye
to you in your small death like the death
of sparrows.
We rearranged you.
We placed your severed hand across your chest,
covered your wounds with flowers,
cried as you wanted.
On your tombstone, we will not chisel “dispossessed.”

Our openhearted little friend has died.
The lover of life has died.
Our friend who hated war,
who didn’t know to kill a fruit fly.
He died terrified of death,
he died used to living.
What scared him most
was being forgotten.

Without his head,
we had carried him in a small shroud,
we had raised him to the sky as if
an offering to the lord of war—
worms and meat.
We had laid the reduced body,
its crushed bones, its distorted skin,
on a vacant table.
The corpse of a hungry child.
The world that eats its flesh.

Gaza 2024

Reviews

“Erudite translator-editors Abu Odeh and Bloor have created a timely and important bilingual anthology of recent poems by 30 Palestinian poets living in Gaza and the West Bank. These potent poems are shattering and sublime, intimate and communal. . . . With war, deprivation, and suffering in Gaza and violence and injustice in the West Bank, dire horrors mostly hidden from the world, poets as courageous witnesses are desperately needed. Read and share these testaments to the fact that neither bloodshed or even death can extinguish truth and poetry.”—Raúl Niño, Booklist STARRED REVIEW

“You Must Live: New Poetry From Palestine is both a prayer and an order: that the rich polyphony of voices continue to live in face of ongoing genocide. Bringing together works from contemporary poets currently living in Palestine (with the exception of Yahya Ashour, who was stranded in Michigan when the war began), the poems in this collection vibrate with present urgency, acting as a testimony not only to the brutality of the Israeli invasion, but the vibrancy of the fractured literary community in Gaza.”—Christopher Alexander, Asymptote

“Each poem in You Must Live (Copper Canyon, 2025) is accompanied by the year and place of its composition. Forty-three times, in small, faint italics: Gaza, 2024. Sometimes the West Bank. Sometimes a few years before that. It’s a convention you see most often in editions of writers long dead, when scattered drafts are painstakingly reassembled in a variorum edition. Or in collections of letters, when you peer over the shoulders of the dead as they tell each other how each day was with them. In the pages of this anthology, as chronological time eddies and ruptures around trauma, as scenes of actual deprivation are braided with sensuously rendered memory and imagination, and as poets address those dead and those about to be with equal loving plainness, the heartbreak is, momentarily, lightened; the murdered turn to us, and open their eyes, before falling back to sleep.”—Noah Warren, Kismet

“You Must Live embodies this duality of power and openness, making room for grief and sorrow, alongside nostalgia, memories, and dreams of a gentler future.”—Amira Hayat, Poetry Wales

“That we have these poems at all is a testament to the tenacity of the editors and the courage of the poets. . . . These poets, over and over again, insist on making it possible for those of us ‘living outside of Gaza’ to imagine their grief, the repression and injustice and death they are living with constantly, to be moved by it, to refuse to accept any of this as ‘routine.'”—W.D. Ehrhart, Current Affairs

“To date, many English-language anthologies have necessarily focused on the diaspora — on poems written at a distance from the daily annihilation of space and identity. You Must Live shifts that gravity, because its center is not exile; it is presence. It gives us a glimpse of what it means to write while still inside the ruin and chaos.”—Shole Wolpé, The Markaz Review