Sadder Than Water

New and selected poems by one of the foremost Palestinian poets and a major figure in the Arab world.

One of the foremost Palestinian poets and a major figure in the Arab world, Samih al-Qasim was born in 1939, in Zarqa, Jordan to a Palestinian Druze family from the Galilee. He grew up in the village of Rama and experienced the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 first hand, achieving fame as one of the celebrated "resistance poets" during the 1950s. His first book was published when he was just eighteen, and over the decades he has produced a body of work that is as varied and innovative as it is large. A resident of Rama until his death in 2014, Samih al-Qasim remained to the end an outspoken opponent of racism and oppression on all sides of the Middle East conflict. Given the richness of al-Qasim's work, and its centrality to Arabic literature at large, it is surprising that his poetry remains almost unknown in English to non-specialists, since one cannot really claim to understand modern Palestinian letters without reading Samih al-Qasim. Sadder Than Water collects poems (with en face Arabic) from his various periods and modes and makes available to English readers the full range of al-Qasim's oeuvre, which is characterized by its ironic approach to painfully charged political situations, its melancholy music, and its lyrical evocation of Palestinian heritage.