Ahmad Almallah
“I’m not sure that writing in itself can help in compensating for the loss of home, or anything for that matter. It’s a nice idea that we play around with, especially in academic circles and so on, but I don’t think it works that way. One’s connection with the land is real, and when it’s broken by injustice, oppression or any other reason, the consequences are just as real and devastating.”
“Ahmad Almallah’s Wrong Winds faces the headwinds of American empire and genocide and refuses to look away. Poem by poem, line by line, Almallah leans into the wind and harvests a new kind of English, a poetry that wrestles with the Waste Lands in poetry and in the world. It is a language we need to learn, and soon, to awaken from this nightmare.”
“Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah’s razor-sharp third collection, Wrong Winds, bears witness to the devastation of Gaza…For Almallah, who now lives in Philadelphia, Pa., Gaza is elusive, enduringly potent—and mourned. Sometimes earnest, sometimes jaded, Wrong Winds is a remarkable memorial.”
“Engaging, controlled, irrepressible.”
“Reading Almallah’s haunting collection in 2024, it is impossible not to feel the loss and pain of genocide, the slow violence that unfolds each day with rapid intensity in the Gaza Strip. Border Wisdom grapples with this loss through a bilingual lens of Arabic and English, through life and death that surface with the loss of a mother and a mother tongue: “in this land of new beginnings / I own no language.” Translation and malformations become necessary strategies to refuse linguistic, social, and political borders. “I tell you this translaformation is more accurate a / translation than I ever imagined,” writes Almallah. This collection is a beautiful elegy for a mother and a mother tongue.”
“The problem with poets is that they see everything: the end, the needles, the mother as another. And the brilliance of this collection is that it forges an ethics of grief that challenges human containment, estranging the act of living from the first person and divorcing lyricism from its habitual “you.” Between Arabic and English and without slipping into nostalgia, Almallah crafts a place from which to write where sentiency extends beyond human conventions. And what is more defiant than claiming that what you have lost has also lost you? Than reversing the direction of grief, whereby the living are indebted to the dead and the dead too insist on claiming the living? There is nothing the occupation can do about that.”
“Finely crafted debut collection . . . . From his citizenship interview to a final meditation on the past as he asks his daughter to repeat her sentences in Arabic, Almallah’s poetry-cum-memoir doesn’t shout but with pointed, persistent, limpid lines minimized to the very essence sums up loss and fractured identity as sharply as any jeremiad.”
Ahmad Almallah is a poet who grew up in Palestine and Pennylvania. His newest poetry collection, Wrong Winds, is out with Fonograf Editions (2025). His other collections include Border Wisdom (Winter Editions 2023) and Bitter English (Chicago 2019). His poems appeared in Poetry, SAND, APR, MQR, Icarus among others. His honors include: a fellowship and residency at Millay Arts, the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize and the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. Some of his work in Arabic has appeared in Al-Arabi Al-Jadid and Al-Quds Al-Arabi. His English works have been translated into Arabic, Russian and Telugu.
He was asked in an interview about his engagement with Emily Dickinson’s work, and how he thinks about sound or music when writing poetry: “When I was reading Dickinson, I could just hear her words striking my ear-drums, and the cranks in my mind were simply shifting with her sounds. I got into a routine of reading her every morning, picking a line or two that were semantically and musically striking, and then I would respond to them mostly in an imitation of her own music. After months and months of imitating her music, I began to consider responding with mine. I still cling to the idea that poetry should be musical and not simply tonal.”
He is an artist in residence in English and Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia.
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