“Once I Forget,” a collection of poems by John P. Portelli, originally written in Maltese and translated by Aaron Aquilina and John Martin. These sections include the title page, a preface by Professor Norbert Bugeja, and portions of the poems themselves, which explore themes of memory, exile, loss, and the poet’s childhood village, Ħad-Dingli. The preface highlights Portelli’s struggle with forgetfulness and his focus on the vanishing past, connecting his work to literary figures like Yeats and Walcott. Furthermore, the source provides biographical notes on the author, translators, and cover artist, Carmel Micallef, along with endorsements that praise the poetry’s transcendence of the lyric and its powerful exploration of nostalgia and the impossibility of return.
Translated from the Maltese by Aaron Aquilina and John Martin.
John P. Portelli treads along those nebulous cliff-edges where forgetfulness attempts to pick at the treacherous scabs of recall, capturing the vertigo of a distant childhood as it inches outward
into the land’s end of metaphor. — Prof. Norbert Bugeja
Portelli’s gorgeous poems speak of exile, searching, and loss in such a way that the reader becomes one with the village of his birth, the cliffs, the smells, his frail body, and the sea. —Jennifer Hosein, Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal-born writer, visual artist and educator, author A Map of Rain Days
..the poems of Once I Forget restore our faith in the transcendence of the lyric, in the power of song and secular psalm. — Karen Shenfeld, Canadian writer and film-maker,
author The Law of Return
John P. Portelli originally from Malta, is a professor emeritus in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. Besides 11 academic books, he has published ten collections of poetry (four in Maltese and English, one in…
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The book is a literary project with extra-literary objectives and implications. The texts combine various original writing styles to provoke the reader’s creative imagination and make auratic social space attainable. For realizing its main goal, through its creative aesthetics, the book debases normalized forms of social violence, exclusionism, and tribalism. It is meant to be universally relatable by an average reader regardless of her perceived and proclaimed identities. In a way, it is an embodiment of postnihilism, which is a philosophical theory that emphasizes the significance of negativity in the face of unspoken social rules of exclusionism. Postnihilism has been theorized in Revolutionary Hope After Nihilism (Bloomsbury 2022). “Auratic space” is a concept advanced in Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura(SUNY Press 2019) and The Death of Home (De Gruyter 2024).
S. Bahozde’s (Saladdin Ahmed) Elsewhereness antipoetry actualizes its stated marching orders via forceful dialectical serial logic and keen humor (hilarity, really). This book is an “act of attacking the unimaginability of a better world. The Bikonian-Fanonian bursts of anti-poetics, their counter-measures break past the givens to model how such—proper name, place, political calculus—engender and resist, repel and authorize cunning sequences of anti-capitalist trespass. An (anti-) poetics that playfully negates its aesthetic medium of refusal and choice, all the while setting its sights on its key mark: encroaching nihilism in the face of brutal displacement. S. Bahozde’s work dismantles claims in favor of negations, clearing forth space for open-ended, future liberatory claims. Its poetry as propositional logic’s meditations on completion, works, and absence is shudderingly smart. This is poetry as food fueling revolutionary exilic work.”
— Jeremy Matthew Glick, Professor African Diasporic Literature and Modern Drama. Hunter College, English Department, City University of New York, author of The Black Radical Tragic
A voice speaks here which is at once profoundly Kurdish and cosmopolitan. While tracing the melancholy of the spaces of exile, its loneliness and longing, Bahozde takes the reader into spaces where the disillusionment with history does not lead to nihilism. Here the brevity of aphorism tackles the tangled metaphysics of absence and existence. Here is a foreignness that take us away from “pickled banalities” and disturbs our complacent belonging to places, nations, and histories
— Rohit Dalvi, professor of philosophy, Brock University, author of Deleuze and Guattari Explained
This is a passionate and bold set of works that range over topics and concerns widely with an almost febrile intensity. Bahozde’s poetic negations of “normalcy” gain their strength both from rich philosophical insights and from a searching, provocative imagination. Even when set in moments of apparent languor, they have an evident, restless energy.
— Gaurav Majumdar, Whitman College; author, Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900-1940
Dispossessed is a poetic representation of life in three stages through the eyes of a poet. It shows, from the thematic interests of the poet; what he considers the crucial stages in life – Innocence, Transgression and Atonement.
Innocence offers a racy view of the picture gallery of the poet’s life as a child. The sensibilities of the poet shine through the foliage of his mind as he pines for self-definition; seeking open ears for his verses. But it is also a period of apprenticeship as the poet hones his skills for the artistic long journey that is inevitable. Clothed in the innocence of childhood, he learns to talk in metaphors and search for himself in the community of imaginative people. This search lights up the path into the poet’s aesthetic mindscape and the silent questions that keep him awake. Innocence is therefore a thirst for sunlight; a quest for utterance.
The unwary reader is beckoned into the quest through poems that evoke memories of their own childhood and conscript them into the ensuing communal experience. However, the human condition abhors inertia. But for any form of natural or artistic growth to occur, the poet must lose his innocence. So, Innocence and its poems of idyllic childhood soon give way to the unexpected — Transgression. Transgression is the coming of age segment of the collection. The poet discovers love. And slowly, he finds himself taking a dip in a pool of emotion that appears to serve as the ultimate sparkplug for his songs.
In essence, Transgression eases the reader into a rare observatory; from where the poet could be seen falling in and out of love and celebrating one of the most profound experiences known to man. It must be noted that in some instances, the love poems of Transgression are also not what they seem on the surface. In some instances, the poet addresses his troubled relationship with his country through poetry; mirroring his personal frustrations and disappointment in verses that come off as a voice of disenchantment. Caught in the firm grip of emotions, the poet changes like the English weather.
But after waves of emotional whirlwinds in Transgression, the poet faces the next logical step — Atonement. Atonement presents a poet who has undergone the rites of passage and weaned himself of self-doubts. He has washed his hands clean and must settle down to a fireside dinner with the elders. But as it turns out, the poet is not only seeking the ears of his genealogical ancestors and elders; he is also seeking the counsel of serious poets, past and present whose nod he needs to take on the weighty issues of his time. So, he comes with a “fistful of kolanuts” as is customary with his people who supplicate their elders and ancestors with kolanuts. In gaining entry into this conclave of his biological and artistic ancestors, he acquires the aesthetic authority to ask weighty questions about the world around him. He is incensed by what assails his sensibilities; a world that turns a blind eye to injustice and a humanity that needs an open heart surgery.
Atonement could also be seen as the poet’s personal admission that serious poetry ought to speak to the dominant issues of the day; the anxieties and insomnia of the age. He muses about these issues; posing rhetorical questions in about them in some instances.
In the end, dispossessed is one man’s journey that finally assumes all the attributes of a communal voyage. Treading in the imagined interstices between the personal and the communal, dispossessed leads us to a clearing in the woods where our awareness of our world heightens with the turning of every page.
James Eze was born in Enugu, southeast Nigeria, shortly after the Biafran War. He was the pioneer Literary Editor of Sunday Sun. As Head of External Communications at Fidelity Bank, he worked in partnership with the novelist Chimamanda Adichie to begin her popular International Creative Writing Workshop series. He is the curator of Under African Skies which hosts A Flutter in the Woods; a yearly evening of poetry and songs in Awka, Anambra State. He also co-founded The Return to Idoto, a poetry festival in honour of Christopher Okigbo. His poems have appeared in Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria.
Spoon and Shrapnel uniquely combines poetry and recipes to explore the experience of surviving the Iran-Iraq War through a child’s eyes. As a survivor herself, Sheema Kalbasi brings forth raw memories of fear, loss, and resilience through verse, while accompanying these poignant moments with simple, nourishing recipes that sustained her family amidst scarcity and danger. Each poem is paired with a recipe, alternating between the emotional depth of poetry and the practical art of cooking traditions that offered hope during wartime. The poems deliver vivid, emotional insights into life during the conflict, while the recipes—crafted with scarce ingredients—represent moments of comfort and survival. Together, they form a narrative tapestry where food and poetry intertwine, reflecting how one family, and an entire culture, persevered.
Kalbasi’s work goes beyond her personal experience to present a universal story of resilience, illustrating how, even in the harshest conditions, humanity finds strength in the simple rituals of cooking, eating, and storytelling. Spoon and Shrapnel is a tribute to both physical and emotional survival, offering readers a rare glimpse into everyday life during war.
Ancestral Daughter is a poignant collection of free-verse poetry by Palestinian writer Zeina Jhaish, exploring themes of diaspora, identity, resistance, and love. Through vivid imagery and raw emotion, Jhaish navigates her dual existence as a Palestinian woman from Gaza living in the diaspora, weaving personal and collective histories into her verses. The book is divided into two parts: “Ancestral,” which delves into exile, land, and the trauma of occupation, and “Daughter,” which reflects on womanhood, heartbreak, and rebirth. Poems like “Haifa on 85th Avenue” and “Godforsaken Homes” juxtapose longing for homeland with the alienation of displacement, while “Being a Palestinian Woman: A Guide” celebrates resilience. Jhaish honors her heritage, mourns ongoing violence, and clings to hope, dedicating the work to Gaza and Palestinian martyrs. Blending English and Arabic, her poetry is a testament to ancestral love and the unyielding spirit of her people.
20% of the income from e-book orders will be donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
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These poems by Issa Shivji, lawyer, activist and Tanzanian public intellectual, were written at different times in different circumstances. They give vent to personal anguish and political anger. Mostly originally written in Kiswahili, here accompanied by English translations, and they are intensely personal and political.
Poems are clustered under several headings to provide a context. The first combines personal agony at the loss of comrades and friends with poems about love and affection for living ones. The second is about robberies of freedom, resources, and dignity and the loss of justice under neoliberalism. The third section, entitled Hopes and Fears, comprises short poems tweeted over the last five years expressing despair, fear and hope in the human capacity for freedom.
The last section are poems, concerned with Shivji’s period in South Africa in 2018, reflect on the emergence of neo-apartheid with its wanton and shameless exploitation of the majority.
Wonderfully translated by Ida Hadjivayanis.
Contents
IGOLI
On love (xxxiii) 13 Dorothy Masuku in Sophiatown 2018 14 Re-Map 16 On love (xxxiv) 18 56 Chapman Street 19 Yesterday Today Tomorrow 20 Marlboro Winter 21 Diepsloot Winter (pre-loadshedding) 22 Only in Jozi 23 Dispossession 24 Ontvangs B Helen Joseph Hospital 25 Mammogram Waiting Room Roodepoort 26 Pholosong Emergency 27 1st Road 28 Inclines 29 Counterclock Clock 30 airbnb Meldene 32 Meldene to Melville, COVID-19 late third wave 33 Excess death or, Acer rubrum 34 Westdene Winter or, Masculinity 35 Shrieking yellow 36 Fleurhof 37 Intraction Extraction 38 On love (xxxv) 40 Moon Garden 41 On love (xxxvi) 42 Garnets or, On love (xxxvii) 43 Spirit 44 Lower 4th Westdene or, On love (xxxviii) 45 On love (xxxix) 46 Natalia Molebatsi and Bab’Themba Mokoena in dance 47 Maps 48 inimba 49 On love (xl) 50 On love (xli) 51 Footsteps 52 inimba (ii) 53 On love (xlii) 54 iSothamilo or, On love (xliii) 55 big little forest 56 On love (xliv) 57
EGoli
or, Only in Jozi (ii) or, On love (xlv) 62 Origins 63 metsi/amanzi/emanti/mvura/madzi/ruwa/water/ /l’eau/ 65 Down Main Street Melville or, Umsebenzi 66 Umsebenzi (ii) 67 Footsteps (ii) 68 Where will we go? 69 RosesRunways 70 On love (xlvi) or, Umsebenzi (iii) 71 72 Wealth 74 Recipe or, Wealth (ii) 75 On love (xlvii) 76 sodade (iii) or, Joy of Jazz Sandton 2017 77 Mushrooms in Mint or, On love (xlviii) 78 Footsteps (iii) 80 Distances 81 Only in Jozi (iii) 82 Greenhill Grocer or, On love (xlix) 83 Only in Jozi (iv) or, On love (l) 84 Fidel Castro at Lillisleaf Farm 2017 or, On love (li) 87 After the launch of Cradles or, 2018 or, On love (lii) 90 sodade (iv) EGoli or, On love (liii) On love (liv)
A new collection of poems by Salimah Valiani. IGoli EGoli is a sociopolitical reading of Johannesburg drawing on its famous, and not so famed, people, places, plants & pronouncements.
First published by [email protected]
Written with urgency out of a war-time Beirut, this poetry collection registers the griefs and the heroism of the Lebanese, under siege yet again. Sabbagh lends his lyrical voice here, to give a voice to the voiceless, trying to find some harmonic sense out of catastrophe. This book will compel readers, both Lebanese and those with any kind of human heart. While much of the work was written swiftly, on impulse, and almost like, as one of the poem’s title’s has it, a ‘War Diary,’ in verse, this work aims nonetheless to last in its significance and resonance at a time when the world as a whole (let alone Lebanon herself) has become so unpredictable, so fickle and so perilous. Night Settles Upon The City aims to be a worthwhile addition to the contemporary literature of war and, more specifically, to the literary representations of the modern Lebanese reality and experience.
Omar Sabbagh is a poet who is privileged to write about war and destruction from the relative safety of his study. But this double-edged illusion is insidious — mental and emotional inwardly, and physical for those who are directly under attack. It is visceral, political, heart-wrenching — yet the poet seeks out light and hope through the act of writing, for the sake of ownership and sharing. He may say that “I cannot read minds and nor / will I ever wish to”, but he writes for the importance of record-keeping, seeking solace, both private and public — as the Night Settles Upon The City of Beirut.
— Sudeep Sen, Winner of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize
Omar Sabbagh has long brought us a world in which personal experience stitches a hyphen between the eastern Mediterranean and the northerly British archipelago. Now he makes the tension inherent within that richness explicit, in a love-letter to his family and home city of Beirut. Written while the ‘night’ of war ‘settles upon the city’, his introductory ‘Thoughts’ show us how unthinkable war remains, even when it arrives on the doorstep. This is a book of witness to what cannot happen, and yet does.
– Fiona Sampson, Professor Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL.Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning WW Norton 2022 – Washington Post Book of the Year, New York Times Editors’ Choice, finalist Plutarch Prize, finalist PEN Jacqueline Bograd Award, Sunday Times Paperback of the year.
The poet Omar Sabbagh lives in Beirut. His voice is playful, almost surreal at times. He talks of ‘the hairbrained monocle of war’ and suggests that if you live long enough in a place like Beirut ‘laughter becomes a lover’s distance-giving kiss’. Night Settles Upon the City offers us a poetry that is neither ideological nor partisan, not of the frontline but of a deeply threatened warzone. Its terms are easy-going, sorrowful, humane, formally intelligent and tinged with apprehension. It is humanity being human. Reading it is relief and hope.’
— George Szirtes FRSL, Eliot Prize winner.
—Dr. Pamela Chrabieh, Kulturnest Co-founder & Managing Director
In Night Settles on the City, Omar Sabbagh gives voice to the bewilderment, fear, rage, and despair so many of us in the Middle East are currently feeling. His eloquent, tender poems grapple with the impossibility—yet absolute necessity—of language at a moment when words otherwise fail. Like all the best poems, Sabbagh’s challenge, soothe, haunt, and rehumanize us, ultimately arousing our better selves.
—Mai Al-Nakib, author of An Unlasting Home and The Hidden Light of Objects
Both erudite and demotic, felt through the body and ‘guided by ear’ Omar Sabbagh’s voice powers through the remote attacks on Beirut – the city in which he currently lives – the hourly atrocities and unspeakable suffering to reach us and to speak for us. ‘What’s to understand?’ he asks ‘That murder can be finessed?’ In his seminal new collection, Night Settles Upon the City, night becomes a ‘dark and violent animal’ with its ‘panther’s pelt’ of terror ‘slowly curving round us’ through which we hear the voice of the aggressor reflecting that ‘…each murderous attack/ I order seems to drain this world of innocence.’ Yet Sabbagh’s own voice remains measured, balanced, especially in the portraits he paints of his beloved father…‘It gets worse each day watching him/ ageing’ (‘The Old Man and his Walking Stick’). This poem ends with the lines ‘an old man and his son, fighting a war/ in a warzone we all must visit’. Alongside unimaginable horror we are shown the ordinary griefs and losses that we all suffer – of ageing, of failing, of being human; and it’s the humanity and compassion with which Sabbagh bears witness that will secure this book’s future among the handful of classics that will come to define our era.
— Jenny Lewis, MA Oxon., MPhil., PhD, Tutor for Poetry, Oxford University
Lines of Fire: Recovering the Lost Arsenal of Anti-Colonial Poetry
Born in Tashkent , forged in clandestine presses, and echoing in today’s streets—this is the recovered front line of a global poetic resistance.
In 1958, at the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent, a 90-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois stood before the decolonizing world and declared: “I am an American—I am an African.” It was a moment of radical, transnational self-definition.
From that conference emerged a literary movement and its journal, The Call—a direct line for poets from Algiers to Hanoi, Cairo to Beijing, to speak to one another, bypassing the languages and borders of their colonial masters. Though the movement later fractured under Cold War pressures, its two wings—The Call and the Soviet-backed Lotus—remained united in their stand against Zionism, racism, and empire.
Their poetry, often crafted under threat of torture, exile, and surveillance, became a clandestine weapon. Some of it was passed hand to hand, read aloud in underground meetings, and chanted at mass gatherings from Delhi to Ramallah, Cape Town to Gaza.
Now, for the first time, this vital corpus is restored. Lines of Fire, edited by Tariq Mehmood—former leading defendant in the landmark Bradford 12 case and now professor at the American University of Beirut—gathers these living weapons into a single, incendiary anthology. In an age of resurgent fascism and genocide, these voices speak with renewed, unyielding force: their anguish, rage, love, and hope are as urgent now as the day they were penned.
Why This Book Is Essential:
A Call to Arms for a New Generation.
Edited by Tariq Mehmood, this collection includes poems by:
Salah Abdel Sabour (1931-1981, Ali Ahmad Said Esber, also known as Adunis (1930- ), Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), Anar Rasul oghlu Rzayef (1938- ), Nobuo Ayukawa (1920-1986), Fadhil al-Azzawi (1940- ), Abd Al-Wahhab al-Bayati (1926-1999), Mahim Bora (1917- ), Bernard Binlin Dadié (1916- ), Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008), Osamu Dazai (1909-1948), Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928-1990), D.B. Dhanapala (1905-1971), Mohammed Dib (1920-2003), Gevorg Emin (1918-1998), Sengiin Erdene (1929-2000), Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984), Rasul Gamzatov (1923-2003), Daniil Granin (1919- ), Colette Anna Gregoire, better known as Anna Greki (1931-1966), Malek Haddad (1927-1978), Pham Ba Ngoan, better known by his pen name Thanh Hai (1930-1980), Buland al-Haidari (1926-1996), Suheil Idris (1925-2008), Yusuf Idris (1927-1991), Fazil Iskander (1929- ), Zulfiya Isroilova (1915-1996), Ali Sardar Jafri (1913-2000), Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), Edward al-Kharrat (1926- 2015), Hajime Kijima (1928-2004), Mazisi Kunene (1930-2006), Alex La Guma (1925-1985), U Gtun Kyi, better known by his pen name Minn Latt Yekhaun (1925-1985), Abdul Hayee better known by his pen name Sahir Lundhianvi (1921-1980), Zaki Naguib Mahmoud (1905-1993), Nazik Al-Malaika (1923-2007), Mouloud Mammeri (1917-1989), Yuri Nagibin (1920-1994), Sergey Narovchatov (1919-1981), Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj (1906-1937), Hiroshi Noma (1915-1991), Gabriel jibaba Okara (1921- ), Amrita Pritam (1919-2005), Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1901-1937), Richard Rive (1931-1989), Rady Saddouk (1938-2010), Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926-1964), Ousmane Sembene (1923- 2007), Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001), Yusuf al-Sibai (1917-1978), Fadwa Tuqan (1917-2003), Sonomyn Udval (1921-1991), Ramses Younan (1913-1966), and Tawfiq Ziad (1929-1994).
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