by
Tenement Press
6/16/2025, paperback
SKU: 9781917304030
This is a pre-order. We expect this title to ship in late October. Any order containing this title will be held until then.
A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the midsts of unspeakable violence.
Reviews:
"One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people. What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing." --Max Porter
"Batool Abu Akleen writes sinuous, urgent, intimately provocative poems that we need. Etel Adnan’s work comes to mind in these poems’ frankness and fervour; and they’re happening today." --Eileen Myles
"These poems witness dispossession so profound, the poet longs even for certainty that her body will rest in a grave. This searing fact is the heart of 48 Kgs." --Anne Michaels
About the Contributors:
Batool Abu Akleen is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. At the age of fifteen, 2020, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishesthereafter. Abu Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications, including ArabLit and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others. Her poem ‘Gunpowder’ was awarded third place in the 2025 London Magazine poetry prize, and her work was included in the July 2024 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, ‘Salam to Gaza.’ Abu Akleen was Modern Poetry in Translation’s 2024 ‘Poet / Translator in Residence.’ Her poetry has appeared in editors Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Alshaer’s anthology, Letters from Gaza (Penguin, 2025) and—alongside Nahil Mohan, Sondos Sabra and Ala’a Obaid—she is one of the four Gazan authors included in the collection Voices of Resistance (Comma Press, 2025).
Graham Liddell is a writer, translator, and PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His dissertation is a study of the narration of contemporary Arab and Afghan migration experiences in both published literature and the asylum process. In 2019–2020, he conducted fieldwork and interviews with asylum seekers while volunteering in Greece. His translations of two short stories from Emile Habiby’s collection Sextet of the Six-Day War were published in Banipal in 2022. Prior to graduate school, Graham worked in journalism, focusing on the Arab world and its diasporas. His writing has beenpublished in USA Today, Middle East Eye and the Detroit News, among other publications.
Wiam El-Tamami is an Egyptian writer, translator and editor. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Paris Review, Granta, Ploughshares, Freeman’s, LitHub, AGNI, ArabLit, CRAFT, and The Common, among others. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Prize, was shortlisted for the 2023 Disquiet International Prize, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2024. She is currently based in Berlin.
Cristina Viti is a translator and poet working with Italian, English and French. Among her publications are Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger (Tenement Press, 2022), a co-translation of poems by Anna Gréki, The Streets of Algiers and Other Poems (Smokestack Books, 2020), and her translation of Elsa Morante’s The World Saved by Kids and Other Epics(Seagull Books, 2016), which was shortlisted for the John Florio Prize. Viti held collaborative translation workshops within the Radical Translations project run by the French and Comparative Literature departments of King’s College; Tenement’s imprint No University Press published an anthology of texts resulting of these workshops in 2024, An Anarchist Playbook.
Yasmin Zaher is a Palestinian journalist and writer. Her debut novel The Coin (Catapult / Footnotes) — a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice — was published in 2024, and awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize, 2025.