Exhausted on the Cross

A much-anticipated follow-up to Nothing More to Lose, this is only the second poetry collection translated into English from a vital voice of Arabic literature.

“We drag histories behind us,” the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish writes in Exhausted on the Cross, “here / where there’s neither land / nor sky.” In pared-down lines, brilliantly translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Darwish records what Raúl Zurita describes as “something immemorial, almost unspeakable”—a poetry driven by a “moral imperative” to be a “colossal record of violence and, at the same time, the no less colossal record of compassion.” Darwish’s poems cross histories, cultures, and geographies, taking us from the grime of modern-day Shatila and the opulence of medieval Baghdad to the gardens of Samarkand and the open-air prison of present-day Gaza. We join the Persian poet Hafez in the conquered city of Shiraz and converse with the Prophet Mohammad in Medina. Poem after poem evokes the humor in the face of despair, the hope in the face of nightmare.

Najwan Darwish, one of the foremost Arabic-language poets of his generation, was born in Jerusalem in 1978, exactly thirty years after his family was exiled from their home in the western part of the city. Since the publication of his first collection in 2000, his poetry has been acclaimed across the Arab world and translated into fifteen languages. In 2009 he was on the Hay Festival Beirut’s list of the “best 39 Arab authors under the age of 39.” 

Kareem James Abu-Zeid is a translator, editor, writer, teacher, and scholar who works across multiple languages. He has received numerous awards, fellowships, honors, and residencies for his work as a translator and a scholar, including the 2017 Translation Prize from the PEN Center USA and a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts translation grant. Abu-Zeid is also the author of the forthcoming book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice. He lives between southern India and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Raúl Zurita is a poet, artist, and activist. His poetry collection, INRI, is available in the NYRB Poets series.