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.
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Breaking Poems takes on the geographic lines that have bound women for ages and marked their bodies, their selves with the lines of unjust notions of property and exploitation. These are poems that inform the dreams of a world that honors woman and honors woman speaking her own voice, breaking the bonds of old worlds with bright moments, bright moments, bright moments. --Afaa Michael Weaver<br /><br />Incantatory and powerful, Suheir Hammad's voice compels you in these new poems to enact a beautiful revolution, a retrieval from the very heart of loss. Everything falls on the off beat, wa love, wa body, wa life, wa freedom. --Chris Abani<br /><br />Suheir Hammad's break introduces English to an Arabic vernacular that startles into being an altogether new language, bridging the archipelago of a Palestine under siege to the diaspora and beyond, breaking through convention, breaking open locks on mind and heart, breaking into a music inspired by the Coltranes, Sun Ra and free jazz, Lee Scratch Perry and Ravi Shankar, a music that is at once a joyous celebration of survival and a poignant cri de Coeur that cannot be ignored and that Mahmoud Darwish should have lived to see. This is a poetry written for people who have endured the winds of hurricanes and invasions. What wisdom, energy, joy and poignancy Hammad brings to the page-for all of this, and for teaching me a new speaking, I give her my thanks. --Carolyn Forché
Suheir Hammad's break introduces English to an Arabic vernacular that startles into being an altogether new language, bridging the archipelago of a Palestine under siege to the diaspora and beyond, breaking through convention, breaking open locks on mind and heart, breaking into a music inspired by the Coltranes, Sun Ra and free jazz, Lee Scratch Perry and Ravi Shankar, a music that is at once a joyous celebration of survival and a poignant cri de Coeur that cannot be ignored and that Mahmoud Darwish should have lived to see. This is a poetry written for people who have endured the winds of hurricanes and invasions. What wisdom, energy, joy and poignancy Hammad brings to the page-for all of this, and for teaching me a new speaking, I give her my thanks. --Carolyn Forché
Breaking Poems takes on the geographic lines that have bound women for ages and marked their bodies, their selves with the lines of unjust notions of property and exploitation. These are poems that inform the dreams of a world that honors woman and honors woman speaking her own voice, breaking the bonds of old worlds with bright moments, bright moments, bright moments. --Afaa Michael Weaver
Suheir Hammad's break introduces English to an Arabic vernacular that startles into being an altogether new language, bridging the archipelago of a Palestine under siege to the diaspora and beyond, breaking through convention, breaking open locks on mind and heart, breaking into a music inspired by the Coltranes, Sun Ra and free jazz, Lee Scratch Perry and Ravi Shankar, a music that is at once a joyous celebration of survival and a poignant cri de Coeur that cannot be ignored and that Mahmoud Darwish should have lived to see. This is a poetry written for people who have endured the winds of hurricanes and invasions. What wisdom, energy, joy and poignancy Hammad brings to the page-for all of this, and for teaching me a new speaking, I give her my thanks. --Carolyn Forché
Breaking Poems takes on the geographic lines that have bound women for ages and marked their bodies, their selves with the lines of unjust notions of property and exploitation. These are poems that inform the dreams of a world that honors woman and honors woman speaking her own voice, breaking the bonds of old worlds with bright moments, bright moments, bright moments. --Afaa Michael Weaver
About the Author
Suheir Hammad's
work has appeared in dozens of anthologies and numerous publications. She was a co-writer and original cast member in the Tony-award winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. An Amherst College Aaron Copeland Fellow, she stars in the movie Salt of the Sea. The author of Born Palestenian, Born Black; Drops of This Story and ZataarDiva, Suheir has won several awards for her writing, including The Audre Lorde Poetry Award, a Van Lier Fellowship, and a Sister of Fire Award.
work has appeared in dozens of anthologies and numerous publications. She was a co-writer and original cast member in the Tony-award winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. An Amherst College Aaron Copeland Fellow, she stars in the movie Salt of the Sea. The author of Born Palestenian, Born Black; Drops of This Story and ZataarDiva, Suheir has won several awards for her writing, including The Audre Lorde Poetry Award, a Van Lier Fellowship, and a Sister of Fire Award.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
By matt horton
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
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
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By nola love
The poetry of Suheir Hammad is both classical and new. Brilliant and passionate. Immediate and timeless. She is among the greatest living poets. This book is a departure for her, the work is more formal, but it stands as one of her best. I recommend it highly, for anyone that loves poetry, for anyone who thinks, for anyone who feels.
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