Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic.

Fady Joudah's collection The Earth in the Attic, published by Yale University Press, reads like a quiet storm of human emotions and experiences. Winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, the oldest literary prize in the U.S., Joudah's poems explore loss, displacement, suffering, and longing. They drift from the personal and specific to the larger stories of peoples and nations that Joudah encounters.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Joudah's poems is the way in which the images and subjects of the poems can shift from the present moment to a distant but living and unfinished past. The experience of time suspended, or past and present shifting, is profound, and is elegantly rendered in many of the poems in this collection.

Many of the poems are imagistic and draw on Arabic and Western literary references. Like exquisite photographs, they capture light and texture, and paint a rich and often unsettling psychological portrait that speaks as much about our condition as it does about the subjects of the poems themselves.

In her forward to the book, poet Louise Glück says that Joudah "confuses [the] rituals of classification" associated with poetry. The poems cannot simply be categorized as political. Rather, Joudah's experiences as the child of Palestinian refugees and his own service as an ER physician at the VA hospital in Houston and with Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and Darfur provide the setting for the introspections that unfold in each of these works.

Joudah's unique talent is to offer poetry readers a look at a wounded and fractured world through his eyes. The poems possess a transformative power, because in reading them we not only look at some of the destitute corners of the earth, but we also take on his sense of longing and dispossession, we stand with him on the margins and experience the loss. In "Atlas" Joudah writes:

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"This blue crested hoopoe is whizzing ahead of us
From bough to bough,
The hummingbird wings

Like fighter jets
Refueling in midair.

If you believe, the hoopoe
Is a good omen,

The driver says,
Then you are one of us." (pg 4)

When we see the world through Joudah's eyes, we are looking on with great compassion and humility, and we become witnesses to much more than a moment recorded in a poem. Joudah's poems open up a world that is foreign and distant to many readers. The artful precision of his imagery is matched by their lyric beauty. Joudah's poems deserve to be read again and again, and offer new discoveries with each reading.

Purchase Joudah's book at Amazon.com.