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Yale Series of Younger Poets
The Earth in the Attic
" The Earth in the Attic reads like a quiet storm of human emotions and experiences. . . . Joudah's poems explore loss, displacement, suffering, and longing. They drift from the personal and specific to the larger stories of peoples and nations that Joudah encounters. . . . [His] unique talent is to offer poetry readers a look at a wounded and fractured world through his eyes."—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, The Institute for Middle East Understanding
Winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, 2007
In The Earth in the Attic Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American physician, explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget.”
Winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, 2007
In The Earth in the Attic Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American physician, explores big themes—identity, war, religion, what we hold in common—while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget.”
- GenresPoetryWarMiddle East
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
11 people are currently reading
489 people want to read
About the author
Fady Joudah
29 books93 followersJoudah was born in Austin, Texas in 1971 to Palestinian refugee parents, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He returned to the United States to study to become a doctor, first attending the University of Georgia in Athens, and then the Medical College of Georgia, before completing his medical training at the University of Texas. Joudah currently practices as an ER physician in Houston, Texas. He has also volunteered abroad with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders.
Joudah's poetry has been published in a variety of publications, including Poetry, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner and Crab Orchard Review.
In 2006, he published The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of recent poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish translated from Arabic, which was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
In 2012, Joudah published Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, a collection of poems by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan translated from Arabic, which won the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
His book of poetry Alight was published in 2013.
In 2017, Joudah translated Zaqtan's The Silence That Remains.
His 2021 poetry collection, Tethered to the Stars, was cited by Cleveland Review of Books as a poetry collection that "does not teach us how to answer any question it poses with a stylized rhetoric, a self-important flourish; the poems model a lyrical thinking which prompts the question itself."
Joudah won the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, given to an American writer of “exceptional talent. His work entitled [...] was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlist and longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.
Joudah's poetry has been published in a variety of publications, including Poetry, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner and Crab Orchard Review.
In 2006, he published The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of recent poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish translated from Arabic, which was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
In 2012, Joudah published Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, a collection of poems by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan translated from Arabic, which won the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
His book of poetry Alight was published in 2013.
In 2017, Joudah translated Zaqtan's The Silence That Remains.
His 2021 poetry collection, Tethered to the Stars, was cited by Cleveland Review of Books as a poetry collection that "does not teach us how to answer any question it poses with a stylized rhetoric, a self-important flourish; the poems model a lyrical thinking which prompts the question itself."
Joudah won the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, given to an American writer of “exceptional talent. His work entitled [...] was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlist and longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
July 27, 2008
We (and by "we" I mean "me") love the saying "All poetry is political," but for Joudah, a Palestinian-American and a member of Doctors Without Borders, that notion pervades his manuscript as an ocean keeping the many boats of verse afloat. This is not to categorize Joudah's work as strictly political or bland rhetoric, but rather to suggest that for some, their lives and inseparable from their artistic self, their being always a part of their object.
From the first stanza, the depth of Joudah's experience hits us as a sudden rain storm, and we are some of us ill-dressed. Joudah strings the image of wheat reaching into the sky with a helicopter crashing to Earth. In his poetry, Joudah combines the best of western Modernism (H.D.'s Imagism, Eliot's scope and Zukofsky's lyric) with the great Arabic tradition of Darwish and Youssef.
Joudah's poetry is powerful for its scope, but builds that scope with a small and focused lens - a landscape photo built of a thousand polaroids. He captures those smaller moments - people in markets, camel traders, day laborers, a boy gathering water in a bucket. The everyday tragedy of a people suffering in the oppressive throes of the last great colonial war then paired with a western eye. It is startling how Joudah switches between the two, blends them so skillfully. He tells a parable of ants leaving their shelters after the earth has been bombed with rain, before painting a portrait of a child whose skin is "like spandex on the bone" and whose father has been killed. Amazingly, the facts of that death are unimportant in a scenescape where hunger, rape and violent deaths are a constant hum, a dust that seems ever present on the skin.
Joudah's poetry is a poetry of people, but a poetry from a physician's eye. The people in his work becoming more alive somehow when viewed with his diagnostic, unemotional eye. A bus-load of dead children, a girl dying of malnutrition, and Joudah's own father passing through an airport. The objects stand for themselves within his poetic gaze. Joudah's line follows this, recalls Creeley and Oppen as a bass stutter that flows one line into the next as a back beat, a wave ebbing and flowing on his ocean elevating the boats of verse.
His poems are drawn from life, organic you might say, from sand and pain and blood. Unfiltered in an affected journalism, there are moments when we flinch, moments we turn away from the image, from the reality in the verse. Morning coffee is finished before a pig is bled to death. The goats, we learn, are later bled in a different fashion.
From the first stanza, the depth of Joudah's experience hits us as a sudden rain storm, and we are some of us ill-dressed. Joudah strings the image of wheat reaching into the sky with a helicopter crashing to Earth. In his poetry, Joudah combines the best of western Modernism (H.D.'s Imagism, Eliot's scope and Zukofsky's lyric) with the great Arabic tradition of Darwish and Youssef.
Joudah's poetry is powerful for its scope, but builds that scope with a small and focused lens - a landscape photo built of a thousand polaroids. He captures those smaller moments - people in markets, camel traders, day laborers, a boy gathering water in a bucket. The everyday tragedy of a people suffering in the oppressive throes of the last great colonial war then paired with a western eye. It is startling how Joudah switches between the two, blends them so skillfully. He tells a parable of ants leaving their shelters after the earth has been bombed with rain, before painting a portrait of a child whose skin is "like spandex on the bone" and whose father has been killed. Amazingly, the facts of that death are unimportant in a scenescape where hunger, rape and violent deaths are a constant hum, a dust that seems ever present on the skin.
Joudah's poetry is a poetry of people, but a poetry from a physician's eye. The people in his work becoming more alive somehow when viewed with his diagnostic, unemotional eye. A bus-load of dead children, a girl dying of malnutrition, and Joudah's own father passing through an airport. The objects stand for themselves within his poetic gaze. Joudah's line follows this, recalls Creeley and Oppen as a bass stutter that flows one line into the next as a back beat, a wave ebbing and flowing on his ocean elevating the boats of verse.
His poems are drawn from life, organic you might say, from sand and pain and blood. Unfiltered in an affected journalism, there are moments when we flinch, moments we turn away from the image, from the reality in the verse. Morning coffee is finished before a pig is bled to death. The goats, we learn, are later bled in a different fashion.
August 7, 2016
Say I found you and god
On the same day at the border
Of words,
On the same day at the border
Of words,
December 21, 2016
The only poetry collection I have found difficult to put down so far—almost every poem has managed to put a smile on my face! This sure enough will keep anyone reading. And there are poems I’m ready to read again and again … aloud too!
Joudah’s style is similar to that of a painter—a portrait poet. Some poems present a distinct picture in each stanza, often juxtaposing different people and elements, the sum of which adds up to the general meaning of the poem. At other instances, Joudah relies on repetition and parallel structures to convey the unison and harmony that can be felt in nature:
“The roots will sense your ailment.
The flowers will scan your organs.
Geranium for the spleen,
Poppies for the brain,”
Here are some of my favorite moments:
“An officer asked
My father for fingerprints,
And my father refused,
So another offered him tea
And he sipped it. The teacup
Template for fingerprints.”
———————————————
“Say I found you and god
On the same day at the border
Of words, better two late birds than
The stone that hit them.
Say the stone is my death, when we met,
You and I, near the cross
Of the iv pole and fell
In love with the other
Side of the hammer,
The one for removing nails
Say you will hold me tightly.
Say the pharaoh’s daughter
Wanted to play mother,
So the pharaoh tested the divine
With an ember near
The suckling mouth.
Say Moses lisped his promise.
And termites chewed
On Solomon’s stick
Until they broke his last repose.”
———————————————
“I know an axe and a turtle’s shell.
I know the day I won
A silver watch in school
Then came home with my father
To tell my mother her mother had died.
I know the way
My mother slapped him
And let her nails
Linger. Bleeding,
He smiled to teach me:
We slap whom we love.”
Joudah’s style is similar to that of a painter—a portrait poet. Some poems present a distinct picture in each stanza, often juxtaposing different people and elements, the sum of which adds up to the general meaning of the poem. At other instances, Joudah relies on repetition and parallel structures to convey the unison and harmony that can be felt in nature:
“The roots will sense your ailment.
The flowers will scan your organs.
Geranium for the spleen,
Poppies for the brain,”
Here are some of my favorite moments:
“An officer asked
My father for fingerprints,
And my father refused,
So another offered him tea
And he sipped it. The teacup
Template for fingerprints.”
———————————————
“Say I found you and god
On the same day at the border
Of words, better two late birds than
The stone that hit them.
Say the stone is my death, when we met,
You and I, near the cross
Of the iv pole and fell
In love with the other
Side of the hammer,
The one for removing nails
Say you will hold me tightly.
Say the pharaoh’s daughter
Wanted to play mother,
So the pharaoh tested the divine
With an ember near
The suckling mouth.
Say Moses lisped his promise.
And termites chewed
On Solomon’s stick
Until they broke his last repose.”
———————————————
“I know an axe and a turtle’s shell.
I know the day I won
A silver watch in school
Then came home with my father
To tell my mother her mother had died.
I know the way
My mother slapped him
And let her nails
Linger. Bleeding,
He smiled to teach me:
We slap whom we love.”
June 19, 2008
Someone once pointed out that judges of the Yale Younger Poets prize are dependent on what comes across their desks. There are fat years and lean years. W. S. Merwin's first year as judge was a lean one, evidently, since he could find no manuscript worth publishing. But this year is a fat one, if Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic is any indication. Joudah's poetry is powerful in part because it has the sharp flavor of real life about it, not the musty, innocuous taste of the Academy. (His status as a Palestinian-American medical doctor and his experience as a field member of Doctors Without Borders must be involved in the human urgency that drives his poems.) His is a poetry in which inner and outer worlds are inextricably intertwined—a quality that allows Joudah to pass back and forth between these worlds seamlessly, so that his poems resonate like two cello strings stroked by a single bow. His dominant subject is outsidership (if I may coin a word): a state that sometimes has the ache of exile, and other times has the serenity of emotional and intellectual distance. Joudah's outsidership allows him to write out of what Peter Dale Scott would call "deep politics"—a level at which he can bear witness to both history's warring spiders and the complex patterns of the web that sustains them. I believe one would have to reach all the way back to 1992's winner Hands of the Saddlemaker, by Nicholas Samaras, to find a Yale Younger Poet's selection of comparable range and power.
July 3, 2015
Up the banks a few women
Gathered teargas husks to sell
As spice containers..
I have known Fady Joudah through his translation work of great Palestinian poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan..his book explores the themes of war, refugees and identity..something common and very known in Palestinian poetry..I would give 3.5 stars..to re read..!
Gathered teargas husks to sell
As spice containers..
I have known Fady Joudah through his translation work of great Palestinian poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan..his book explores the themes of war, refugees and identity..something common and very known in Palestinian poetry..I would give 3.5 stars..to re read..!
Read
September 12, 2024Joudah's poems at times stretch (or snap, or surmount) the boundaries of logical sense, which I could see as an enactment of the possible sense-annihilating effects of their subjects (imperial violence, exile). To the extent that accomplished poetry enacts reality instead of just telling about it, these are very successful. My favorite poems, in general, make sense. But what Joudah does here seems to be honest and humble: he does not claim to create what he cannot, perhaps should not, create (he does not try to ascribe meaning to the suffering of others), and he does not dramatize violence (he does not, as Forrest Gander once said some poets writing about violence do, "pose in a leather jacket in front of the burning city"). This makes Joudah different from a poet who uses senselessness as a screen for a barren imagination—his senselessness seems as bloody and barren as the real land itself.
January 17, 2024
Joudah's book is a quiet volume of poems. But that doesn't mean his political imagery is any less powerful. In fact, in some ways the universality that emerge through is metaphors slice through the reader's heart. What is especially illuminating are the natural images found throughout the poems, particularly those of birds. The variety of birds and the versatile symbolism they carry leaves an indelible impression on the reader. A magnificent book of poetry.
July 21, 2022
"Pulse" / "Immigrant Song" / "Love Poem" / "Moon Grass Rain" / "The Onion Poem" / "Ascension" / "Home"
February 18, 2015
I really enjoyed reading this book rich with imagery and emotional fluency. Such intimate and stunning portraits of relationships, especially between parent and child.
Some of my favorite moments:
The white flying flowers, the ibis, and the one
That aesthetizes you more.
I open my French dictionary on Wednesday
It says, see also Saturday
we read versus from the Quran,
our palms open,
Elbows upright like surgeons
Ready to gown up after scrubbing, the slapping
of rubber gloves before we went our separate ways.
Maybe, one day, one kid
Will pick up running,
For love handles, say, or for protracted divorce,
Or for the self in the upper percent.
And what kills a condor is not another condor.
Some of my favorite moments:
The white flying flowers, the ibis, and the one
That aesthetizes you more.
I open my French dictionary on Wednesday
It says, see also Saturday
we read versus from the Quran,
our palms open,
Elbows upright like surgeons
Ready to gown up after scrubbing, the slapping
of rubber gloves before we went our separate ways.
Maybe, one day, one kid
Will pick up running,
For love handles, say, or for protracted divorce,
Or for the self in the upper percent.
And what kills a condor is not another condor.
May 10, 2010
In her introduction to The Earth in the Attic, Louise Glück says of poet Fady Joudah that he is “the outsider, but a particular outsider, his method less interrogation than identification. …As an Arab in the West, as a doctor who practices emergency medicine, as a poet writing in English, for a number of reasons, in a variety of situations, Joudah finds himself not at home, not among his people.” Outsider does not mean alone, and The Earth in the Attic is populated with others who are not at home, who cannot go home, for whom the very idea of home is in the distant past.
Complete review here: http://blogthisrock.blogspot.com/sear...
Complete review here: http://blogthisrock.blogspot.com/sear...
February 14, 2014
Intense, clear, often contemplative, often surprising, Fady Joudah's poems in this selection frequently describe terrible scenes in the midst of war, refugees fleeing for safety, hospitals, and dying. And yet, they are full of love and reverence and pop vibrantly with the questions we ask in those situations. Recommended for lovers of poetry - lyrical and political - and also spiritual writing groups.
November 27, 2014
The Pulse poems were everything. For instance:
"Up the banks a few women
Gathered teargas husks to sell
As spice containers. (from 5.)
I love Joudah's often subtle articulation of such a pervasive violence. As a migrant myself, I can relate to issues of (political) estrangement and displacement, which often come with or after violence. I hope to read more of these on his later collections.
"Up the banks a few women
Gathered teargas husks to sell
As spice containers. (from 5.)
I love Joudah's often subtle articulation of such a pervasive violence. As a migrant myself, I can relate to issues of (political) estrangement and displacement, which often come with or after violence. I hope to read more of these on his later collections.
April 7, 2010
Some of these poems were a bit baffling to me, others heartbreaking, some immediate, others slow to rise and bloom. I can see myself reading through it more than twice and the title keeps growing and growing on me (shades of old Jungian allegiances).
April 6, 2011
Hardly a surprising turn of phrase or use of language. Just didn't feel emotionally full or even interested. Part of this, I'll admit is jealousy at my inability to write sparser poems, but I wouldn't say more than two poems surprised me.
December 8, 2015
I began reading a touch skeptically. I concluded with much astonishment. A necessary book: it makes you necessary for its purposes, but you find you have been waiting for its casually uplifted, saddened lines for as long as you know.
April 25, 2015
More good poetry. I'd suggest Alight first before this one, but both collections are strong.
August 10, 2008
An excellent collection.
I especially liked the long piece "Pulse."
I especially liked the long piece "Pulse."
January 31, 2024
"You will give them your spoon, blanket and beans,
They'll let you keep your life. And if you jump off the truck,
The army jeep trailing it will run you over.
Later, they will accuse you of giving up your land."
(from Scarecrow)
Devastatingly beautiful. Read the entire collection in one sitting with tears in my eyes and then immediately re-read it. Joudah is the voice of the displaced Palestinians, and every line he writes exposes their generational trauma. Will return to this collection many times in the future.
"Maybe, one day, one kid
Will pick up running,
For love handles, say, or for protracted divorce,
Or for the self in the upper percent.
Or maybe another child is a poet
Who will write the two strangers
In one of his famous pieces
For who we really are...
And we would call it even."
(from Pulse 15)
They'll let you keep your life. And if you jump off the truck,
The army jeep trailing it will run you over.
Later, they will accuse you of giving up your land."
(from Scarecrow)
Devastatingly beautiful. Read the entire collection in one sitting with tears in my eyes and then immediately re-read it. Joudah is the voice of the displaced Palestinians, and every line he writes exposes their generational trauma. Will return to this collection many times in the future.
"Maybe, one day, one kid
Will pick up running,
For love handles, say, or for protracted divorce,
Or for the self in the upper percent.
Or maybe another child is a poet
Who will write the two strangers
In one of his famous pieces
For who we really are...
And we would call it even."
(from Pulse 15)
February 4, 2022
we the people dream the city: ooh you give me fever.
ooh you give me fever so bad i shake like beads out of a rosary. - immigrant song.
because the earth knows / the scent of history, / it gave the people sage. - the tea and sage poem
and also: proposal, atlas, the way back, sleeping trees, home, along came a spider
ooh you give me fever so bad i shake like beads out of a rosary. - immigrant song.
because the earth knows / the scent of history, / it gave the people sage. - the tea and sage poem
and also: proposal, atlas, the way back, sleeping trees, home, along came a spider
November 11, 2023
Really bummed by how cold this left me feeling. The reviews are pretty stellar and it clearly fared well on the prize market, but I felt like I could never really gain traction within the poem and then it would just be over. It read more like a swirl of images, memories, and exchanges. Glad others liked it much more than me!
July 15, 2024
In deceptively simple syntax, Joudah creates little window between Palestine and the US in each poem, some opening to the east and some opening to the west. He humanizes a region and a people that are often lost behind headline of bomb explosions and reminds our humanity is always there amidst violence.
February 19, 2025
"God is a refugee dreaming of tea"
Taking a quote away from any context might serve to elevate it . . .
...or...
"Simile blooms in the wasp's neural return"
..maybe just make it more head scratching.
Taking a quote away from any context might serve to elevate it . . .
...or...
"Simile blooms in the wasp's neural return"
..maybe just make it more head scratching.
April 12, 2021
Popsugar 2021: A book by a Muslim American author.
August 10, 2021
I am struck by what different worlds exist. What different worlds people live in. There are grapes, birds, and trees; and they live with people experiencing violence, war, and exile.
May 22, 2014
Sparse and devastating. His form looked simple, but then the line-breaks were so masterful I kept grabbing people wherever I was and asking them to read him. I would really love to see him read his work. So much aching in each line: "I look for your hair and find it/ In the night, holding color. . . ." The culture inferences are so powerful as the poet is a doctor with Doctors Without Borders. His work is like a photograph of where we can't help but stare.
Want to read
June 12, 2009Met the poet and the poems he read were amazing. They had such vivid imagery that I could picture so well. The poet himself is such an intelluctual and really smart guy, but a bit imtimidating. I wasn't able to buy the book because they had very little copies and a lot of people, but will buy it in the future and read.
November 19, 2009
Excellent introduction by Louise Gluck which refutes bogus distinctions between personal and political poetry. Some wonderful poems in here. I like the trajectory between Western and Arab lyric, and the phrase 'I am the distance from birds to Jerusalem'. Favourite poems: 'Sleeping Trees', 'The Idea of Return', 'Love Poem', 'Landscape', 'Moon Grass Rain', 'The Onion Poem', 'Image', 'Bird Banner'.
March 14, 2015
A 2008 collection of poetry that won the Yale Series of Younger Poets judged
by Louise Gluck. The author is a Palestinian-American who writes about his
country's politics in a lyrical fashion. It is a book of exile, war, refugees.
The long series of "Pulse" is very dramatic and powerful.
by Louise Gluck. The author is a Palestinian-American who writes about his
country's politics in a lyrical fashion. It is a book of exile, war, refugees.
The long series of "Pulse" is very dramatic and powerful.
Read
May 26, 2010...I keep going back to this poems, their haunting beauty, and "pulse".
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews