Your Name, Palestine by Olivia Elias
Elias’s second collection in English—translated by Jérémy Robert and Sarah Riggs—is an ode to the blazing beauty of Palestine in which the poet draws from the “heart and the wind playing between high hills and deserts” the strength to question the doom that came to her hometown. Taking inspiration from Aimé Césaire and other writers, and with the help of musicians, Elias redefines the notion of nation, and the sense of belonging, be it to a country or a memory. “Your Name, Palestine,” the choral poem at the center of this book, commends a “people that knocks / relentlessly on the doors of the future / a country pushed into the margins of history.”
Printed in a limited edition of 300 copies, this hand-bound chapbook with letterpress covers features a series of drawings made in response to Elias’s poems by Basil King, a New-York-based artist and writer associated with Black Mountain College.
Elias’s second collection in English—translated by Jérémy Robert and Sarah Riggs—is an ode to the blazing beauty of Palestine in which the poet draws from the “heart and the wind playing between high hills and deserts” the strength to question the doom that came to her hometown. Taking inspiration from Aimé Césaire and other writers, and with the help of musicians, Elias redefines the notion of nation, and the sense of belonging, be it to a country or a memory. “Your Name, Palestine,” the choral poem at the center of this book, commends a “people that knocks / relentlessly on the doors of the future / a country pushed into the margins of history.”
Printed in a limited edition of 300 copies, this hand-bound chapbook with letterpress covers features a series of drawings made in response to Elias’s poems by Basil King, a New-York-based artist and writer associated with Black Mountain College.
Elias’s second collection in English—translated by Jérémy Robert and Sarah Riggs—is an ode to the blazing beauty of Palestine in which the poet draws from the “heart and the wind playing between high hills and deserts” the strength to question the doom that came to her hometown. Taking inspiration from Aimé Césaire and other writers, and with the help of musicians, Elias redefines the notion of nation, and the sense of belonging, be it to a country or a memory. “Your Name, Palestine,” the choral poem at the center of this book, commends a “people that knocks / relentlessly on the doors of the future / a country pushed into the margins of history.”
Printed in a limited edition of 300 copies, this hand-bound chapbook with letterpress covers features a series of drawings made in response to Elias’s poems by Basil King, a New-York-based artist and writer associated with Black Mountain College.