Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2025, pp. 88-89
Book Talks
“HERE’S THE MIRACLE of poetry that interrupts failed notions of ‘peace’ with insistence on Palestinian living,” George Abraham read from the introduction of the recently released anthology he co-edited, Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry, at its launch at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC on May 30. Abraham is an award-winning Palestinian American poet, memoirist and scholar who currently serves as the executive director of Mizna, a nonprofit contemporary Arab and Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) arts organization based in Minnesota. The anthology’s other co-editor, Noor Hindi, is a Palestinian American poet, essayist and reporter whose debut poetry collection, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow., was published in 2022.
While Hindi could not appear at the book launch, four other contributors to the anthology appeared alongside Abraham, reading Palestinian poems from both within and outside the anthology and offering their reflections on Palestinian poetic production in the present moment.
Abraham and Hindi began curating the anthology in 2020, simply at the request of the publisher, Haymarket Books, which was hoping to print a collection of Palestinian poetry. However, over the five years of its curation, the anthology took on new purpose, especially after the start of Israel’s genocidal bombardment of the Gaza Strip in October 2023.
One of the most notable dynamic shifts that took place after October 7 for Abraham was the transformation of poetic metaphors into realities. He illustrates this through the case of anthology contributor Dr. Refaat Alareer, the world-renowned writer and professor from Gaza who Israel murdered in a targeted attack on his home on Dec. 6, 2023. Abraham explained that Alareer’s poem, “If I Must Die,” which is included in the anthology, was written in 2011 not as a literal will but a metaphor for the conditions of living under occupation, bombardment and besiegement in Gaza. However, after Alareer’s murder, the metaphor become reality, and likewise the anthology had to reckon with the concept of ‘Palestine the metaphor’ being shattered, as Abaraham put it in the event’s question-and-answer session.
Abraham and Hindi organized the anthology into thematic sections, each with a unique through-line, such as the environment, metapoetry, feminism and futurism. Each section contains poets from across decades and geographies, putting writers in conversation with each other despite the colonial fragmentation of Palestinian society. In Heaven Looks Like Us, works of poets displaced in the Nakba are printed next to those of Palestinian youth in occupied Palestine. Legends such as Mahmoud Darwish sit opposite up-and-coming poets such as Leena Aboutaleb. Poems of recently martyred writers from Gaza appear alongside those of Palestinians whose families have lived in the far diaspora for generations.
In this manner, Heaven Looks Like Us rejects a monolithic understanding of Palestinian poetry, celebrating the multitude of subjectivities, perspectives and experiences that define contemporary Palestinian identity. “Resisting what it means to write the Palestinian poem,” Abraham explained, was the crux of curating the collection, emphasizing the editors’ intention to expand the definition of Palestinian poetry to its furthest extent. In total, the anthology includes poems from over 100 contributors.
Heaven Looks Like Us takes its name from a line from Fargo Tbakhi’s poem “Palestine Is a Futurism: Prophecies (Cruising Jerusalem),” which appears in the anthology and which Tbakhi sang at the book launch. The poem, written entirely in capital letters, passionately describes the decolonization of Palestine, from armed struggle against the violent conditions of settler colonialism and the superstructure of imperialism to the futurist creation of a material, liberated Palestine. Reflecting on the poem and the curative logic of the anthology, Abraham mused, “What is the relationship of a collective to an idea of paradise, of liberation, of utopia, dare I say?” He suggests that Tbakhi’s poem offers an answer. “I love that the line of Fargo’s inverts the logic,” he explained, “no, we don’t project ourselves onto heaven. Heaven itself should look like us. We’re dragging it back down to earth, and there’s something about that logic that really speaks to the whole of what Noor and I were trying to do with the anthology.”
Abraham also noted a double meaning to the title. Aside from the metaphorical interpretation, Abraham said it alludes to the material experiences of surveillance and bearing witness. “Heaven looks like us. Heaven is looking. Heaven is watching, so I’m also just thinking about looking and surveillance,” he said.
The anthology’s cover features a panel from Palestinian installation artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna’s series “The Cleaning Collages.” It depicts a celestial array of overlapping geometric figures of whites, blues and lavenders, interspersed with clouds and rays of light. Speaking on the anthology’s cover art, Abraham explained, “We wanted something abstract. We didn’t want to just be yet another Palestine anthology with insert figural nationalistic symbolic iconography, like 99 percent of other Palestinian anthologies. We wanted something a little bit different, also something that felt on theme, something that felt like it was cohesive with the title as well.”
Abraham concluded the event with a brief reflection on the entire project. “An anthology is a living, breathing object. ‘Anthology’ means ‘collection of flowers’ etymologically, and these [poems] are not dead things. These are things that live, that are gifted, that are circulated… And I think that Heaven Looks Like Us has enough contained-ness and abstraction to float and mean a million different things to a million different people.”
—Lukas Soloman
