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Alight
"With anatomical precision, Joudah illustrates scenes that are at once uncanny and contemporary, be it a Bedouin woman's lavender mourning veil, the chrome doors to an alchemist's home, or the mysterious speaker in 'Smoke,' who exits abruptly and claims to have 'scripts to write and scrolls to find,' a testament to the duties of attending physician and displaced poet alike. In both roles, Joudah has records to keep and history to revisit, and does so beautifully."—Booklist
“Joudah’s poetry is rich with the influences and styles of both American and Arabic poetry. It can be personal and image-driven, by turns, as well as discursive and social. Its lyric gifts are as powerful as its narrative impulse.”—Kenyon Review
“Throughout Alight's carefully structured arc of movement and within its individual poems, the quotidian resides within the mythic. Joudah's is an art written out of experience, rather than about it...Poetry like Joudah's strikes a match into our dark places.”—Poet Lore
The poems in Alight alternate between the estranging familial and strangely familiar, between burning and illumination. As father, husband, and physician, Fady Joudah gives children and vulnerable others voice in this hauntingly lyrical collection, where, with quiet ferociousness, one’s self can be reclaimed from suffering’s grip over mind and spirit.
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, translator, and physician of internal medicine. He received his medical training from the Medical College of Georgia and University of Texas, and served with Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Louise Glück. In 2010 he received a PEN translation award for his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
“Joudah’s poetry is rich with the influences and styles of both American and Arabic poetry. It can be personal and image-driven, by turns, as well as discursive and social. Its lyric gifts are as powerful as its narrative impulse.”—Kenyon Review
“Throughout Alight's carefully structured arc of movement and within its individual poems, the quotidian resides within the mythic. Joudah's is an art written out of experience, rather than about it...Poetry like Joudah's strikes a match into our dark places.”—Poet Lore
The poems in Alight alternate between the estranging familial and strangely familiar, between burning and illumination. As father, husband, and physician, Fady Joudah gives children and vulnerable others voice in this hauntingly lyrical collection, where, with quiet ferociousness, one’s self can be reclaimed from suffering’s grip over mind and spirit.
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, translator, and physician of internal medicine. He received his medical training from the Medical College of Georgia and University of Texas, and served with Doctors Without Borders in 2002 and 2005. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Louise Glück. In 2010 he received a PEN translation award for his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
- GenresPoetry
110 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
10 people are currently reading
141 people want to read
About the author
Fady Joudah
29 books93 followersJoudah was born in Austin, Texas in 1971 to Palestinian refugee parents, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He returned to the United States to study to become a doctor, first attending the University of Georgia in Athens, and then the Medical College of Georgia, before completing his medical training at the University of Texas. Joudah currently practices as an ER physician in Houston, Texas. He has also volunteered abroad with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders.
Joudah's poetry has been published in a variety of publications, including Poetry, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner and Crab Orchard Review.
In 2006, he published The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of recent poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish translated from Arabic, which was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
In 2012, Joudah published Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, a collection of poems by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan translated from Arabic, which won the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
His book of poetry Alight was published in 2013.
In 2017, Joudah translated Zaqtan's The Silence That Remains.
His 2021 poetry collection, Tethered to the Stars, was cited by Cleveland Review of Books as a poetry collection that "does not teach us how to answer any question it poses with a stylized rhetoric, a self-important flourish; the poems model a lyrical thinking which prompts the question itself."
Joudah won the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, given to an American writer of “exceptional talent. His work entitled [...] was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlist and longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.
Joudah's poetry has been published in a variety of publications, including Poetry, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner and Crab Orchard Review.
In 2006, he published The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of recent poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish translated from Arabic, which was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
In 2012, Joudah published Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, a collection of poems by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan translated from Arabic, which won the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
His book of poetry Alight was published in 2013.
In 2017, Joudah translated Zaqtan's The Silence That Remains.
His 2021 poetry collection, Tethered to the Stars, was cited by Cleveland Review of Books as a poetry collection that "does not teach us how to answer any question it poses with a stylized rhetoric, a self-important flourish; the poems model a lyrical thinking which prompts the question itself."
Joudah won the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, given to an American writer of “exceptional talent. His work entitled [...] was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlist and longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
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April 26, 2021First full collection by Fady Joudah, medical doctor, poet, and Arabic translator. I was familiar with his work of translating preeminent Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, so I wanted to check out his personal poetry too. Some highlights in ALIGHT but also want to read his more recent works, and his (multiple) Darwish translations.
"Waterproof" by Fady Joudah
from ALIGHT
How did the time pass
When all we had was
The flow of sense and body
Embrace without pose
For a fossiliferous world
Where the camera fell
In the water of a waterfall
We wanted badly framed
And now its lack is what submits
To memory
Or were those days always there in
Its smithereens of your family's
Photo album as you gather
Around now and over a picture that
Of the selves that are here
And the selves that are gone
"Waterproof" by Fady Joudah
from ALIGHT
How did the time pass
When all we had was
The flow of sense and body
Embrace without pose
For a fossiliferous world
Where the camera fell
In the water of a waterfall
We wanted badly framed
And now its lack is what submits
To memory
Or were those days always there in
Its smithereens of your family's
Photo album as you gather
Around now and over a picture that
Of the selves that are here
And the selves that are gone
February 15, 2014
A book that gestures without grabbing: this to its credit. Joudah is a master of denying reduction, and this is both an interesting and pleasurable collection to read.
February 19, 2019
The Security Level Is Yellow
Last night is so often where things begin/
Maybe because I saw you on Facebook
Earlier in the day making out with
A friend’s status/ or because I had been
Thinking about calligraphy Jackson
Pollock was my pretext/ really he was
A classicist after all following
The fractal of the mind to the rhythms
Of eternal recurrence that bury
And elevate/ open and reopen
The way Jerusalem came to sit on
Jagged mounds/ did you know nostalgia was
A recent word in your language?/ you were
Sitting on one of those metal chairs one
Finds in cafeterias or town halls/
Straddling it like a horseman or a lap
Dancer/ shaking your head at a visa-
Less pace in sheer disappointment/
I had been found out/ I’d left a message
On your answering machine intended
For another’s/ I said I was sorry
But you kept shaking your head as you drove
Away screechless in your middle-middle-
Class car/ I tried to tell you about that
Time in the Rockies we were three and the wind
Betrayed me down the hill as if it were
A carrier pigeon or a listening
Device/ our third heard everything I
Had said about him but was okay
With it as cool as FYI/ on his
Wedding night/ I stood and toasted the story
As proof of his capacity to love
Mimesis
My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord
If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking
She said that’s how others
Become refugees isn’t it?
Last night is so often where things begin/
Maybe because I saw you on Facebook
Earlier in the day making out with
A friend’s status/ or because I had been
Thinking about calligraphy Jackson
Pollock was my pretext/ really he was
A classicist after all following
The fractal of the mind to the rhythms
Of eternal recurrence that bury
And elevate/ open and reopen
The way Jerusalem came to sit on
Jagged mounds/ did you know nostalgia was
A recent word in your language?/ you were
Sitting on one of those metal chairs one
Finds in cafeterias or town halls/
Straddling it like a horseman or a lap
Dancer/ shaking your head at a visa-
Less pace in sheer disappointment/
I had been found out/ I’d left a message
On your answering machine intended
For another’s/ I said I was sorry
But you kept shaking your head as you drove
Away screechless in your middle-middle-
Class car/ I tried to tell you about that
Time in the Rockies we were three and the wind
Betrayed me down the hill as if it were
A carrier pigeon or a listening
Device/ our third heard everything I
Had said about him but was okay
With it as cool as FYI/ on his
Wedding night/ I stood and toasted the story
As proof of his capacity to love
Mimesis
My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left of its own accord
If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
And you’d get to go biking
She said that’s how others
Become refugees isn’t it?
June 25, 2025
Some beautiful thoughts on war and lose but not my favorite poetry- at times the freestyle verse or paragraph feels like a deliberate choice to force upon the reader this sense of bluntness/ directness and not mix it with flowery language but I’m the type to want that language, give me painterly writing.
I did not read the last quarter of this collection, I wasn’t feeling it.
I did not read the last quarter of this collection, I wasn’t feeling it.
February 18, 2015
This book represents everything I love about Copper Canyon Press, and how perfectly they curate books that resonate with each other. Here Joudah's voice shows maturity, surprise, and play. The epitome of this for me is the poem "Abundance." Some of my favorite moments:
This world this hospice.
During the hemorrhage years
I want only to return to
my language in the distances of cooing.
Our age is a checkpoint.
Gold didn’t concern me or turning olives into gold
As if I were an alchemist outside chrome
Doors of houses we wear
In dementia like a palindrome
If I chicken well I might egg better
yoked in that way my wife during delivery was rung up like a bar code whenever the nurse knocked or the doctor was called
This world this hospice.
During the hemorrhage years
I want only to return to
my language in the distances of cooing.
Our age is a checkpoint.
Gold didn’t concern me or turning olives into gold
As if I were an alchemist outside chrome
Doors of houses we wear
In dementia like a palindrome
If I chicken well I might egg better
yoked in that way my wife during delivery was rung up like a bar code whenever the nurse knocked or the doctor was called
April 25, 2015
My favorite of the two more traditional Fady Joudah poetry collections I've read. I think I like the idea behind Textu a bit more than the long-form poems, but this collection is also very strong.
May 18, 2018
There are so many things I want to say about Joudah and his skill set. The summary is: he is such a master. He really didn't want to punctuate, I get the idea of a run on, what I'm crazy about is the precise line breaks, it makes him so so in charge of the music the poems sing. He is another master I like.
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February 14, 2024In Alight, Fady Joudah is gesturing out at the world from the ecstatic internal. As he says in the poem Twice a River, “Even love is a place? O son / Love no country and hate none” and that’s the liminal space most of these poems live in. All these poems with no punctuation and traditional capitalization disrupt enjambment. This is a work requiring diligent attention.
June 27, 2024
Another moving volume of poetry by Fadi Joudah. I'm so taken by the way he uses medical metaphors and imagery in his poems. The way those metaphors provide the connective tissue to feeling deeply about Palestine is so very powerful and beautiful.
Read
April 8, 2025Visceral, vivid imagery. Words are rhythmic and seem to dance. Masterful use of line breaks without punctuation, which was almost playful with meaning at times, creating a dance of the lines and their cadence.
January 15, 2023
mimesis 10/10
July 21, 2025
"Even love is a place? O son
Love no country and hate none
And remember crimes sometimes
Immortalize their victims
Other times the victimizer."
Love no country and hate none
And remember crimes sometimes
Immortalize their victims
Other times the victimizer."
December 24, 2025
Strong meditations of medicine, fatherhood, marriage, and displacement. I loved every poem in which he reconciles his identity with his role in his community.
January 22, 2019
border
to seduce memory
into song
to twist it
in a twister country
and in turn
internally displace it
base it
in the basement
the trees overtake
the streets shave off
twigs and leaves
and covered in green
the city appears
as forest
deserted for many years
for years
I reach the story
no one around
a desk in the cellar
the orang peel
its thick pulp
a day's meal
to seduce memory
into song
to twist it
in a twister country
and in turn
internally displace it
base it
in the basement
the trees overtake
the streets shave off
twigs and leaves
and covered in green
the city appears
as forest
deserted for many years
for years
I reach the story
no one around
a desk in the cellar
the orang peel
its thick pulp
a day's meal
September 30, 2013
after reading Joudah's first collection "The Earth in the Attic," which I liked very much, I was somewhat disappointed with Alight.
November 13, 2014
maybe i'm just in a long poem mood. i often felt like these poems ended just as they were picking up steam.
April 7, 2017
Oof. What a book to read the morning after we bombed Syria. Heavy, dark pieces interlaced with dreamy landscapes and some surprising humor.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews