Description

rock flight is a book-length poem that follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.

‘Poetry’s most captivating speech is the apparatus of colonial and administrative language wickedly turned back on itself. This poetry is wicked: a rock, flung whilst studied, signalling hard, unerring and remarkable.’ – Holly Pester

‘rock flight is relentlessly potent. Merging resistance and poetry, Hasib Hourani writes back—against the “suffocating state” and imperial forces. Be ready to be transformed by Hourani’s diasporic anticolonial poetics.’ – Don Mee Choi

‘rock flight registers catastrophic silences, deletions, choked speech, at the same time as it builds a language capable of resistance. Hourani is a brilliant poet, generous with his own story, scrupulous with facts, incisive and ambidextrous with poetic technique. His impossible multiple choice questions, dazing asides, involving passages of narrative train the eye on constriction, violence, and freedom: the box, the rock, the bird soaring with a spear through its neck.’ – Caleb Klaces

‘Here is a poetry of passion; a poetry of necessity; a poetry of survival, and a poetry-triumphant.’ – Maxine Beneba Clarke

‘rock flight is a work of timelessness, rigour, precision, relationality and guts – just like its poet. A must-read for all of us who yearn and stretch and reach for a world beyond colonies, and an even more urgent read for those who don’t.’ – Alison Whittaker

‘rock flight is the poetics of the Palestinian, still elsewhere, with a spear in their throat.’ – PBS Selector Roy McFarlane

Hasib Hourani, born in Bahrain in 1996, is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator who lives in so-called Australia. His 2021 essay, ‘when we blink’ was shortlisted in the Liminal and Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize and appears in the anthology, Against Disappearance. rock flight is his first book.