Breaking Poems
by Suheir Hammad
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Book Summary Information
Author: Suheir HammadEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-12-01
ISBN: 0981913121
Number of pages: 62
Publisher: Cypher Books
Book Reviews of Breaking Poems
Book Review: Review from the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
Summary: 5 Stars
Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad is in a class of her own. The first Palestinian on Broadway, she received a Tony Award for her performance in "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam," and won a Peabody Award for the HBO series of the same name. She stars as Soraya in Annemarie Jacir's film "Salt of This Sea," Palestine's entry in this year's Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film category. Hammad is also an accomplished playwright, as evidenced by "Blood Trinity" (2002) and "ReOrientalism" (2003). Used copies of her debut collection of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black, when available, sell for hundreds of dollars. breaking poems, her fourth collection, demonstrates Hammad's maturation as a poet and captures the Zeitgeist of this moment in the Palestinians' 60-plus-year Nakba at the hands of Zionism--a relentless attempt to eradicate an entire people which continues to this day.
On a technical level, breaking poems represents new heights in Hammad's sparse style. As the title suggests, the poems in this collection read like messages from the front lines--heavy, measured, parsed, rationed--boiled down to essential information and elemental emotion forged by the raging fury of a battle for survival. The style suits Hammad because it accomplishes what many spoken-word poets fail to achieve: a seamless transition from the energy and cadence of live performance to the printed page. Her words, carefully considered and organized, transcend two-dimensional black and white print to encompass voice, beat, image and visceral emotion.
While her previous collections read like galleries of poetic masterpieces, breaking poems is perhaps Hammad's first conceptualized poetic narrative. Her character in this novella is a witness to unfolding physical and psychological terror. Like the assassinated Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali's iconic Handala, Hammad's character in breaking poems is both a victim and a witness to this terror. And, like Handala, her character is the personification of sumoud (steadfastness), clinging to tatters of humanity in a purgatory between hope and disillusion. She engages the scene, but also hovers above it, challenging the contradictions of appearance and reality. Exploring the relationship between mind, body, and soul, she deftly portrays the out-of-body experience of living through war.
Hammad also takes significant innovative risk through the infusion of transliterated Arabic into already densely referenced work. For those who understand the references and are familiar with the vocabulary, Hammad gives voice to unspoken words, feelings, and identities, embodying an Arab world on life support. Her words--at times almost unbearably heavy, intolerably familiar, unspeakably truthful--are glittering shards of a shattered world. As her character descends into madness, lucid verse is distilled to clouds of words the reader is left to decipher.
Skillfully illuminating the emotional and psychological consequences of this historic nadir of the Palestinian national movement, breaking poems is an intimate and gut-wrenching S.O.S. that seeks to heal through description--and awake numb survivors to fight anew.
- By Matt Horton. Originally published in the March 2009 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
Summary of Breaking Poems
In Breaking Poems Suheir Hammad departs from her previous poetry books with a bold and explosive style to do what the best poets have always done: create a new language. Using "break" as a trigger for every poem, Hammad destructs, constructs, and reconstructs the English language for us to hear the sound of a breath, a woman's body, a land, a culture, falling apart, broken, and put back together again.Poetry Books
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