A book with a hole in it

by Kamelya Omayma Youssef

Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s A book with a hole in it uses the poetry of the fragment and the language of everyday survival to gesture towards the fallibility of language at the juncture of the multiple, intersecting wars on women, on "terror," on the non-White body, and on people and language in diaspora. Drawn from a set of journals written over a four-month period, A book with a hole in it throws the formal, official work of poetry into relief, asking what knowledge exists beyond knowledge, which silences are too deep to be surfaced on the page, and how to pierce through trauma and violence to approach a politics of redemption.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef's A book with a hole in it is the 2020 Carolyn Bush Award recipient.

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Kamelya Omayma Youssef is a writer from Dearborn, Michigan, with roots in Jibbayn and Shmistar, Lebanon. She is the author of A book with a hole in it (Wendy’s Subway, 2022), winner of the 2020 Carolyn Bush Award.

Her poems and lyric essays have been published online and in print, including in several anthologies, and produced for the theater stage. She develops liberation-oriented creative workshops and pedagogies with her friends.

Youssef earned an MA in English from Wayne State University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She lives between New York, New York, and Dearborn and Detroit, Michigan.

Reviews

[Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the first things I read this year, and thank God I get to shape the way I think & consider my 2023 after the wonder that this book was. Thank God I get to live on this Earth at the same time as Kamelya Omayma Youssef. With every page I felt gratitude to spend time with this work.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly remarkable, and likely my favorite poetry collection of 2025. This text addresses intergenerational and personal trauma, embodied grief, and the fractured links between spiritual, poetic, and physiological selfhood not with “grace” or “ease” but deliberate friction. And yet, at the same time, this book is remarkable in its disciplined and relentless hope, both as manifested in its explicit intertextuality and in its metatext of growth through unspeakable, unwritable trauma. This is a book that will certainly launch a thousand poems for me, and others too - it is impossible to come away from this willful, daring game of language-disruption uninspired.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

this writer's voice, eye, pen, way of writing feels so singular yet so tapped into the world around them and all their influences in such an intuitive way. like a birds wing slicing the water. the notes at the end of the book were their own masterpiece as well. I wish more writers included notes like that in their books. it's a turning toward and love letter to the collective world of writers and thinkers and readers people in general who want and strive for things to be better in every marginal way way we can find and then the big ways too. read this book!

[angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

to know kamelya is to see this brilliance always and to see it immortalized in a book is breathtaking. what she does with the phrase and period leave me with such deep questions, and a want for more. playing with the conventions of language allow for new possibilities and considerations to emerge. from the first page, considerations and questions brewed as i read, digested, read again, looked up definitions, translated, talked with friends, and built bridges. this text gives us so much: irony, cheekiness, directness, calls for self interrogation, love, frustration, forgiveness without forgetting.

i'm excited to return to this text after some time.

[Galiba · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much to process in these words. I will most certainly return to these again and again. There is something here. Deep seated truths and raw vulnerability. I am held here. I see them. I am seen.
Much left to process.

But my favorite section, are the notes at the very end.

I am inspired.

[Kaitlyn Akel · Rating 5 out of 5]

go read this book right now!!!

[y · Rating 1 out of 5]

bunch of words mixed together with absolutely no flow. this is like contemporary art