Unceded Land

Praise:

‘There’s a language for the space between worlds, and Issam Zineh’s stunning Unceded Land is it. It’s rare to encounter such a boundless lyrical voice that deftly leaps from the Nakba and colonialism—“how the wind whispers liberate”—to divorce and desire, but Zineh is part magician that way, never losing the thread. He undertakes the intricate work of naming the beautiful and the brutal around us, and what a lush music he’s made: “This coast will never say / ‘You have moved me.’ Children will be born. / Oranges will still grow without us.” Inventive, propelled by both the divine and the impossibly human, these poems are a profound and breathless truth.’ —Ruth Awad, Author of Set to Music a Wildfire and Outside the Joy

‘Issam Zineh’s terrific full-length debut pries open the spaces between what is said and unsaid, revealing what the echo knows in poems that refuse silence. In breaking and remaking the sacred vessels of form, Unceded Land sings into the layers of family, history, and place to uncover the living voice of loss and survival.’ —Tyler Mills, author of Hawk Parable and Tongue Lyre

‘As one reads of displacement—through time, through locale, through the violences of history—you may feel you can neither look nor look away. The bodies pass through borders, seek safe haven, to find homes of their own.’ —Kazim Ali, author of The Voice of Sheila Chandra