Description:
Winner of 2024 Sarabande 2024 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the Top 10 Poetry collections for Spring 2026, featured in Literary Hub, excerpts featured in The Slowdown, The Believer and the American Academy of Poets magazine
A subversive collection about Palestinian resistance, liberation and art
Written across Palestine and its diaspora--from Gaza and the West Bank to the United States--Intifadas is a subtly transgressive poetry collection about uprising in its many forms--in art, politics, and in our most personal relationships. Whether by dumping black paint on a park where a tank and fighter jet commemorate a war, or by trying to rescue a moth trapped in a garage, the defiant and resilient voices in this collection subvert traditional narratives of loss. Furious, tender, and darkly funny, Intifadas asks what art can do in the face of catastrophe, and answers with poems that refuse easy consolations.
Brief description:
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He releasedGo Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Review Quotes:
PRAISE FOR INTIFADAS
"Absolutely essential reading during these uncertain times."
--Booklist, Starred Review
"These voice-driven narrative poems from Palestinian American artist Salem center on personal, political, and artistic acts of resistance."
--Publisher's Weekly, "Spring 2026 Fiction & Nonfiction Preview: Poetry Top 10"
"The questions he asks about exile and return, collective responsibility and art-making as a form of witness are not simple, but he asks them in ways that invite readers in."
--Bookpage
"In Intifadas Salem accomplishes the very difficult: to balance the scales of our human potentials, and at that, readers will marvel."
--Green Linden Press
"This is a book of poems steeped in tenderness and love for a place, for a people. [...] there is also a richness, a depth of humanity that shines through in the work, and the desire to uplift and protect that humanity might drive you to deep affection, which may flip the switch of rage, which may, I hope, flip the second switch of action."
--Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year
"Edward Salem is a perfect poet. He writes about everything including being Palestinian with an easy publicness, a ferociousness, a jadedness and a warmth--and he accomplishes the hardest part of a poem, the end, like a saint. His endings feel like asides in which everyone, if they want it, feels included."
--Eileen Myles, author of A "Working Life"
"If empire could become a witness to itself, it would look like Salem's work--a beautiful soul who has somehow managed to condense a tremendous amalgam of our collective history and culture without denying either part's intimacy or violence."
--Marwa Helal, author of Invasive species
"Salem has delivered an essential book, alternatingly infuriating and hilarious, a punk manifesto screaming into the void but also throwing stones into it."
--Danny Caine, author of Jewish American Dream
PRAISE FOR EDWARD SALEM
"Salem requires his readers to rethink how and why they come to (Palestinian-American) poetry in the first place, and what quiet cultural-political structures have a vested interest in Palestinian-American verse being either epiphanic or redemptive. [...] One leaves the collection excoriated, but as a result renewed and reattuned to suffering's many registers. We startle back into the worst timeline, this one, where our work lies."
--Noah Warren, Fence Digital
"Salem's writing rings with an honesty that I found intimately provocative yet subtle. . . It's also funny."
--Ottessa Moshfegh, in praise of "Sacrilege"