Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.

Art. Garlic. Taxis. Sleepy soldiers at checkpoints. The smell of trash on a winter street, before “our wild rosebush, neglected / by the gate, / blooms.” Lovers who don’t return, the possibility that you yourself might not return. Making beds. Cleaning up vomit. Reading recipes. In You Can Be the Last Leaf, these are the ordinary and profound—sometimes tragic, sometimes dreamy, sometimes almost frivolous—moments of life under Israeli occupation.

Here, private and public domains are inseparable. Desire, loss, and violence permeate the walls of the home, the borders of the mind. And yet that mind is full of its own fierce and funny voice, its own preoccupations and strangenesses. “It matters to me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat, “what you’re thinking now / as you coerce your kids to sleep / in the middle of shelling”: whether it’s coming up with “plans / to solve the world’s problems,” plans that “eliminate longing from stories, remove exhaustion from groans,” or dreaming “of a war / that’s got no war in it,” or proclaiming that “I don’t believe in survival.”

In You Can Be the Last Leaf, Abu Al-Hayyat has created a richly textured portrait of Palestinian interiority—at once wry and romantic, worried and tenacious, and always singing itself.

"Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat"--

“Al-Hayyat's latest devastating and courageous collection captures the precarious everyday lives of Palestinians with enormous empathy and glistening clarity . . . The vivid translations by Fady Joudah will jostle readers into discomfort and pin Al-Hayyat's stunning voice into their ears.”—Booklist

“Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s brilliant secret is that she holds none. Here language is illuminated with the clarity of one who releases cogitation like pigeons. She writes manifestos with self-destruct buttons for all to push.”—Fady Joudah, author of Tethered to Stars

Praise for Fady Joudah’s Translations

“As a translator of poetry myself, I know the danger, frustration and the joy in the process of catching the fire from the original and delivering it through/into another language, another culture, another sentiment. Mr. Joudah delivered with such grace and power. My salute to Mr. Joudah, as translator to translator, as poet to poet.”—Judges’ Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize

“Translating writing of [Mahmoud Darwish’s] ambition—its radical, willed instability as well as its beauty—requires a delicate and thoughtful ear. . . . These fine translations will consolidate [Joudah’s] reputation. They also allow us to hear—in their fidelity to offbeat punctuation and lineation, to nuances of quotation and allusion—something of the formal innovation of the original.”—The Guardian

“No poet is as closely associated with contemporary Palestinian identity as Darwish . . . but, as this superbly translated selection of poems proves, the work resists classification, ranging over such themes as memory, inheritance, and exile.”—New Yorker

“As Neruda, Szymborska, Paz, and Ritsos offered American poets new possibilities for language and spirit in the past, so, too, does Darwish now. He has, in Joudah’s startling and tensile English, expended into us a new vastness.”—Kenyon Review

“Joudah’s translation offers a window into a masterful poet’s [Ghassan Zaqtan’s] oeuvre and enriches the English-language reader’s library with poems of soft-spoken wonder and hard-edged silences.”—World Literature Today