“Roughly halfway through Najwan Darwish’s Nothing More to Lose, wiping awkwardly at tears and trying self-consciously not to sob with my partner in the room, I found myself wondering what someone with no connection to Palestine would make of it…Here is what I think they would find: a collection of very short poems — often no more than a page — speaking of love, sorrow, loss, hope and despair in a voice simultaneously so passionate and so matter-of-fact that it stops the breath.” —NPR Books
“Readers may presume that writers faced with the immediate realities of life under occupation are limited by the attendant tropes of rage and despair, or else flee into sentimentality or aesthetics. Najwan Darwish’s poetry is different. Constrained by neither temporality nor place, his poetry is a medium of defiance, employing a sharp wit to illuminate absurdities and injustices. Darwish’s poetry renders the particularity of the Palestinian experience in luminous imagery and piercing obser-vations, but his imagination and interests are not limited by borders.” —Emily Dische-Becker, Poetry International
“One of the most exciting young voices in the Arab world.” —Nathalie Handal
“Najwan Darwish’s poetry is different: it seems to have overcome the false dichotomy between poetry and social and political reality. What struck me first about reading these poems is his capacity to do justice to both poetry (to image, to condensed form) while also doing justice to its surrounding reality. This is a significant challenge: how to mediate between two intense forms without ruining either.” —Bashir Abu-Manneh, Barnard College
“The poems…are passionately lyrical, and their imagery is acutely effective….an invitation to learn lessons from history and to know that in the end there is victory for those who persevere, those who may have been forgotten but whose courageous deeds lived to create better lives for future generations.” —Issa J. Boullata, World Literature Today
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