You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems

(Paperback)

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Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Translation

Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.

Art. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before our wild rosebush, neglected / by the gate, / blooms. Lovers who dont return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In You Can Be the Last Leaf, these are the ordinary and profoundsometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolousmoments of life under Israeli occupation.

Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. It matters to me, writes Abu Al-Hayyat, what youre thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling: whether its coming up with plans / to solve the worlds problems, plans that eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans, or dreaming of a war / thats got no war in it, or proclaiming that I dont believe in survival.

In You Can Be the Last Leaf, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiorityat once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.

Reviews

Praise for You Can Be the Last Leaf

The Palestinian poets U.S. debut gathers two decades of her intimate testimony about private life in a public war zone, where those who win by killing fewer children / are losers.New York Times

The Palestinian poets U.S. debut gathers two decades of her intimate testimony about private life in a public war zone, where those who win by killing fewer children / are losers.New York Times Al-Hayyat's latest devastating and courageous collection captures the precarious everyday lives of Palestinians with enormous empathy and glistening clarity . . . The vivid translations by Fady Joudah will jostle readers into discomfort and pin Al-Hayyat's stunning voice into their ears.Booklist

There is so much grief and laughter in this collection, loss and love, as we watch the poet over time in an unending occupation. This unceasing violence seeps into her interior world too, her home and mind. But she still fiercely demands space for desire, laughter, and hope.Pierce Alquist, Book Riot

Abu Al-Hayyat explores the broader political and geographic aspects of Palestinian life under colonial rule while at the same time interweaving the quotidian aspects of life and loss in such settings. Within these frictions of exterior trauma and private contemplations, large constraints and small freedoms, these poems soar.Chicago Review of Books

These poems are the sustaining crumbs that Al-Hayyat has strewn onto the road of our consciousness. Perhaps they will help us find our way home. Perhaps they already are home, the home we construct from the remnants of the dreams that are left to us amid the tumult of our times.Words Without Borders

"You Can Be the Last Leaf is a collection of selected poems from Abu Al-Hayyats four poetry collections . . . it gives the reader a window into the impressive journey that the poet has charted from her first poetry collection . . . This translation is necessary because Abu Al-Hayyat is fierce, impressive, and unapologetically herself. Her work takes the reader on a rollercoaster of emotions anchored in truth. In her poems, the reader experiences life as it is, with its round and broken wholeness. Abu Al-Hayyat writes in a clear and concise fashion about loss, grief, fear, hope, and love echoing her experiences as well as what she witnesses in Palestine."Tel Aviv Review of Books

[Maya Abu Al-Hayyat] dreams, and I would like to dream with her, of the joys that can still be found.Susanna Lang, RHINO

What if / I find what Im looking for asks the poet, a question both disarming and succulent in one of this collections many gently immovable poems. How singular the ordinary is, the poet shows, spotlit as it is against the worlds unending violence. Only a poet of great love like Maya Abu Al-Hayyat could claim both that love dies and is worth a thousand loves with two hands. Are we human the poet also asks. There is no good answer, but we would be foolish to ignore the question. Props must be given to translator Fady Joudah for so sheerly rendering this collection to us undeserving English-speaking readers; I hope we can appreciate the enormity of this gift.Tarfia Faizullah

Each poem in Fady Joudahs translation of Maya Abu Al-Hayyats, You Can Be the Last Leaf arrives whole, a fluid thought, like one long drink of cold water that quenches a deep thirstJoudah skillfully renders Abu Al-Hayyats straightforwardness while also capturing tonal undercurrents of self-incrimination andmost importantlylove.Mira Rosenthal, Words Without Borders

These are poems of understated beauty, understated violence. They both return, conjoined, compelling the reader after the book is put down and picked up again, again. Its a book of quotidian Palestinian existence, where every time I leave the house / its suicide, a book of love in all its varieties, maternal, sororal, blithely erotic, of hope and of despair. Although the poet eschews overt narrative, myriad stories are interwoven here, in the warp and woof of a lyric poetry, seamlessly rendered from language to language by fellow-poet Fady Joudah.Marilyn Hacker

The poems in You Can Be the Last Leaf are told in vignettes, addresses, and near aphorisms. They chronicle the intimate, the sensual worlds that churn despite a colonial cruelty bored with itselfthe worlds of children and lovers, diseases and flesh. Frank, wry, devastating, Maya Abu Al-Hayyats work is an absolute gift to behold, crystalline in Fady Joudahs translation, renewing my faith in language and the houses it can build. This is a powerful introduction to a poet who knows, They will fall in the end, / those who say you cant.Solmaz Sharif

Mayas poetry is breathtaking in its specificity and rendering of heart, land, loss, and love alike.Hala Alyan

Maya Abu Al-Hayyats brilliant secret is that she holds none. Here language is illuminated with the clarity of one who releases cogitation like pigeons. She writes manifestos with self-destruct buttons for all to push.Fady Joudah, author of Tethered to Stars

Praise for Fady Joudahs Translations

As a translator of poetry myself, I know the danger, frustration and the joy in the process of catching the fire from the original and delivering it through/into another language, another culture, another sentiment. Mr. Joudah delivered with such grace and power. My salute to Mr. Joudah, as translator to translator, as poet to poet.Judges Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize

Translating writing of [Mahmoud Darwishs] ambitionits radical, willed instability as well as its beautyrequires a delicate and thoughtful ear. . . . These fine translations will consolidate [Joudahs] reputation. They also allow us to hearin their fidelity to offbeat punctuation and lineation, to nuances of quotation and allusionsomething of the formal innovation of the original.The Guardian

No poet is as closely associated with contemporary Palestinian identity as Darwish . . . but, as this superbly translated selection of poems proves, the work resists classification, ranging over such themes as memory, inheritance, and exile.New Yorker

As Neruda, Szymborska, Paz, and Ritsos offered American poets new possibilities for language and spirit in the past, so, too, does Darwish now. He has, in Joudahs startling and tensile English, expended into us a new vastness.Kenyon Review

Joudahs translation offers a window into a masterful poets [Ghassan Zaqtans] oeuvre and enriches the English-language readers library with poems of soft-spoken wonder and hard-edged silences.World Literature Today

Author Bio

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is the author of You Can Be the Last Leaf. She is also the editor of The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction and a contributor to A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry. Her work has been published in The Guardian, the Irish Times, and Literary Hub. She is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers. Abu Al-Hayyat lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah.

Fady Joudah is the translator of You Can Be the Last Leaf. He is also the author of five collections of poems, including, most recently, Tethered to Stars and Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. He has translated from the Arabic collections by Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Zaqtan, and Amjad Nasser, and is the coeditor and cofounder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Griffin Poetry Prize, a PEN USA award for translation, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.