Samer Abu Hawwash - Ruins and Other Poems
Samer Abu Hawwash
Ruins and Other Poems
Translated from Arabic by
HUDA J. FAKHREDDINE
Bilingual Edition
November 18, 2025
BIOS
SAMER ABU HAWWASH (b. 1972) is a Palestinian poet, novelist, editor, and translator, born in Lebanon. He is the author of 10 poetry collections including his debut collection Life is Printed in New York (1997), I’ll Kill You Death (2012), One Last Selfie with a Dying World (2015), Ruins (2020), and From the River to the Sea (2024). He is also the author of three works of fiction: The Journal of Photographed Niceties (2003), Valentine's Day (2005), and Happiness or A Series of Explosions that Rocked the Capital (2007). Abu Hawwash is the translator of more than 20 volumes of poetry and prose from English including works by William Faulkner, J.G. Ballard, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Yann Martel, Hanif Kureishi, Denis Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, and many others. He lives in Barcelona, Spain where he currently works as the director of the Culture & Society section at Almajalla Magazine.
HUDA J. FAKHREDDINE is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge). Her translations include Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions), The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books), and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah (World Poetry). She is also the author of a book of creative nonfiction, Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time Under a Different Sun), and Wa min thamma al-ālam (And Then the World). She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
Samer Abu Hawwash
Ruins and Other Poems
Translated from Arabic by
HUDA J. FAKHREDDINE
In his English-language debut, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash stands upon ancient and modern ruins, engaging with the archetypal Arabic qasida and its echoes in the present, set against a backdrop of exile, displacement, and genocide.
The site of the ruin, the journey, and the return home are the three movements of the archetypal Arabic form with which Samer contends in his book-length poem. Writing in and from the moment of crisis, the poet keeps returning to ruins, forfeiting the journey and the hope of return and resolution, rearranging the elements of poetry in the Arabic tradition in search of closure or consolation—in a gesture, a shadow, a memory, an object. The five poems that follow “Ruins” in this book root themselves in monumental loss. When “it no longer matters if anyone loves us” and “we will lose this war,” nothing remains but the poem, the witness, the signpost in the wasteland of history.
“Samer Abu Hawwash is the solemn yet glinting revelation of a seer by circumstance; his poetry is prophetic because it remembers—is remembering—not only the past, but the future, that is, the ruins, in which is reflected, as in a thousand scattered mirrors, the lucid, inextinguishable soul of everything that once was. Rendered in immediate, tactile, moving translation by the dauntless, extraordinary Huda Fakhreddine, this is poetry as visionary intimacy: the carrying of the soul “on the edge of this abyss, that is the world.” —Brandon Shimoda
BIOS
SAMER ABU HAWWASH (b. 1972) is a Palestinian poet, novelist, editor, and translator, born in Lebanon. He is the author of 10 poetry collections including his debut collection Life is Printed in New York (1997), I’ll Kill You Death (2012), One Last Selfie with a Dying World (2015), Ruins (2020), and From the River to the Sea (2024). He is also the author of three works of fiction: The Journal of Photographed Niceties (2003), Valentine's Day (2005), and Happiness or A Series of Explosions that Rocked the Capital (2007). Abu Hawwash is the translator of more than 20 volumes of poetry and prose from English including works by William Faulkner, J.G. Ballard, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Yann Martel, Hanif Kureishi, Denis Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, and many others. He lives in Barcelona, Spain where he currently works as the director of the Culture & Society section at Almajalla Magazine.
HUDA J. FAKHREDDINE is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge). Her translations include Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions), The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books), and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah (World Poetry). She is also the author of a book of creative nonfiction, Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time Under a Different Sun), and Wa min thamma al-ālam (And Then the World). She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
Bilingual Edition
November 18, 2025
