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Quiet Orient Riot
Quiet Orient Riot is an exploration of the tendons of motherhood, its mutinies and munificences. It is also a book of births and the politics of birth-regimes. Recounting a journey to bear a Palestinian child in the occupied Palestinian territory, the poems conjure up maternity as forecast, tally, weapon; its many filtrations through liturgical command and demographic anxiety. Maternity is made possible through contingent access to Israel’s sophisticated fertility treatment infrastructure, and it’s made impossible as it coincides with Israel’s 2009 assault on the Gaza Strip. What kind of language, then, can hold a body inside a body through emergency, diminishment, and into resistance and bloom? What kind of language might hold precarious humanhood?
Most significantly, Quiet Orient Riot asks of itself, without release or relief: can a text seek linguistic disorientation and reorientation both? Can a text walk the tightrope from detail to detail to envision a kind of awareness that is kin to worship? Quiet Orient Riot does not shy away from a word like “worship.” Nor does it shy away from how such worship might manifest in the words of a poem, bowing to a “chirpy printed sound” in Palestine and a forest of “little justices.”
Most significantly, Quiet Orient Riot asks of itself, without release or relief: can a text seek linguistic disorientation and reorientation both? Can a text walk the tightrope from detail to detail to envision a kind of awareness that is kin to worship? Quiet Orient Riot does not shy away from a word like “worship.” Nor does it shy away from how such worship might manifest in the words of a poem, bowing to a “chirpy printed sound” in Palestine and a forest of “little justices.”
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published November 7, 2020
48 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 28, 2025
Sealey Challenge 2025: 11/31
Quiet Orient Rot examines motherhood both as an idea and as a lived reality in the context of Palestine. The poet reflects on her experience undergoing fertility treatment in Israel while living as a Palestinian woman, a process shadowed by the knowledge of ongoing daily violence, and later, by the 2009 attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Structurally, the poems occupy only a small block on each page, their lines confined by the physical space yet also interrupted by breaks. This subtle but striking poetic choice mirrors the fractured reality of life under colonial occupation. The abrupt endings and unfinished feel of many poems become an unflinching metaphor of the instability of writing in a time of conflict — when any pause might be permanent, as it tragically is for so many.
The collection poses an impossible, haunting question: How does one hope to bring children into a world like this — especially when the very institutions enabling your fertility are part of the same system that threatens your existence? What does motherhood mean in a horrifying system like this? How can the system that helped you have your child so quickly take them away from you?
This is poetry that is both intimate and political, its form and content inseparable. The result is a work that not only is stunning in its craft but also has an urgency placed on the reader in terms of answering the questions it asks.
Quiet Orient Rot examines motherhood both as an idea and as a lived reality in the context of Palestine. The poet reflects on her experience undergoing fertility treatment in Israel while living as a Palestinian woman, a process shadowed by the knowledge of ongoing daily violence, and later, by the 2009 attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Structurally, the poems occupy only a small block on each page, their lines confined by the physical space yet also interrupted by breaks. This subtle but striking poetic choice mirrors the fractured reality of life under colonial occupation. The abrupt endings and unfinished feel of many poems become an unflinching metaphor of the instability of writing in a time of conflict — when any pause might be permanent, as it tragically is for so many.
The collection poses an impossible, haunting question: How does one hope to bring children into a world like this — especially when the very institutions enabling your fertility are part of the same system that threatens your existence? What does motherhood mean in a horrifying system like this? How can the system that helped you have your child so quickly take them away from you?
This is poetry that is both intimate and political, its form and content inseparable. The result is a work that not only is stunning in its craft but also has an urgency placed on the reader in terms of answering the questions it asks.
June 16, 2025
Pregnant with meditations on the politics of space, of childbearing and birth, especially in the context of Palestine. The poems take up fractions of the space in the book, lines enjambed by the physical limitations of the page but also broken within by vertical dashes, a strikingly subtle concrete-poetic articulation of the colonial situation. A dreamy voice yet a morally impassioned one. Approachable for how much it resides in the ambiguities of the problematics it opens.
Takeaway:
Takeaway:
today a new spreading in my interior body | today is reorienting
| belly bloom | yes israel has a fertility treatment rate that is thirteen
times the united states level per capita | you relish these native olives
bucket girl & it's a little justice | palestinians have a way with children
too | & you are something stunning
November 1, 2020
Beautiful
June 4, 2024
Beautiful collection of poetry that explores fertility under occupation.
February 25, 2025
"she always says that we should stop holding our breath for justice | she says enjoy the little justices instead"
♡
♡
December 22, 2023
QUIET ORIENT RIOT by Nathalie Khankan is a powerful work that moved me with its intimate & textured language & exquisitely crafted form. Please read this book.
from the collection:
A body is a quiet choice | to say that is kinship | we walk to the top | my girl in my hand will grow tired of holding the basket of blossoms | & she says something about dinner & dying & we feel different in our throats | the school children below with their own mothers & stepmothers sail toward us | THIS HEART IS SHAPE SHIFTING
from the collection:
A body is a quiet choice | to say that is kinship | we walk to the top | my girl in my hand will grow tired of holding the basket of blossoms | & she says something about dinner & dying & we feel different in our throats | the school children below with their own mothers & stepmothers sail toward us | THIS HEART IS SHAPE SHIFTING
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews