Fady Joudah Toronto launch for [...]

Another Story Bookshop presents the Toronto launch of [...] by Fady Joudah

Featuring a reading and conversation with Pacinthe Mattar

The Theatre Centre, Franco Boni Theatre, 1115 Queen Street West

Books will be for sale and there will be a book signing

Co-sponsored by The Toronto Palestine Film Festival, Health Workers Alliance for Palestine, The Theatre Centre and Milkweed Editions

About the book

From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, […] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land.

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

Pacinthe Mattar is an independent journalist, writer, producer, journalism instructor and media critic. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Pacinthe has since called Toronto, Saudi Arabia and Dubai home. She has spent over a decade in journalism and media, including ten years at the CBC, where she was a long-term producer at The Current on CBC Radio One. Her journalism has focused on race and racism, police brutality, refugees and migration, violence against women, Middle East politics, pop culture Indigenous issues and more.

Access information:

The Theatre Centre is physically accessible to audiences and artists alike. Each level has a barrier-free washroom and there’s a lift available for public use. There is an e-door at the entrance.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen Street West, Toronto, Canada