You scrub from my throat the darkness that sticks to songstraveling at the speed of light. The songs you playare all I hear. With our morningcoffee and kitchen hours.Gone are my industrial sorrows. I am backto the blue Arabic note,the astonishment of loveas an astonishment of lossthat shakes the world off its tail.I am singing in the shower.Are you with me?Are we face-to-faceor spooning, swaying, swallowing, breathingwithin lidless glass? Do we still give thanksto the gas tank and electric powerthat make space for our safe space?We don’t think hope,the only tyrannywe’ll never overthrow,will ever run dry.
Barzakh
Fady Joudah
Feature Date
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Jenny Xie
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First published in the March 27th, 2025 issue of The New York Review of Books.
Photo:
Cybele Knowles
Cybele Knowles
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 the Jackson Poetry Prize, 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.
March 27, 2025
New York, New York
Editor
Emily Greenhouse
Deputy Editor
Michael Shae
Executive Editor
Jana Prikryl
The New York Review of Books has established itself, in Esquire’s words, as “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.” The New York Review began during the New York publishing strike of 1963, when its founding editors, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, and their friends, decided to create a new kind of magazine—one in which the most interesting and qualified minds of our time would discuss current books and issues in depth. Just as importantly, it was determined that the Review should be an independent publication; it began life as an independent editorial voice and it remains independent today.
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