Chaos, Crossing

In her English-language debut, acclaimed French-language poet of the Palestinian diaspora Olivia Elias probes deeply into the upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chaos, Crossing -- translated by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid -- is a powerful chronicle of uprootedness, of times marked by inequality, injustice, and disconnection. These poems seek the calm at the center of the storm, the still point amidst the chaos. || "Each of Olivia Elias's...
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In her English-language debut, acclaimed French-language poet of the Palestinian diaspora Olivia Elias probes deeply into the upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chaos, Crossing -- translated by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid -- is a powerful chronicle of uprootedness, of times marked by inequality, injustice, and disconnection. These poems seek the calm at the center of the storm, the still point amidst the chaos. || "Each of Olivia Elias's powerful poems sparkles with the unexpected: exile puts down roots in time, healing is a Ferris wheel, and loss a slough that leads to language. Kareem James Abu-Zeid's translations are delicate and wonderful. This book is a joy to read." --JENNIFER CROFT || "Olivia Elias, child of the Nakba, is a world citizen, resident at one time or another of Lebanon, Canada, France. But as a poet, she remains a Palestinian, inhabited by the landscape, the language, creating lyrics that speak the sorrow of displacement, and a memory vaster and deeper than any one woman's, with a restraint that dignifies both grief and rage." --MARILYN HACKER || "Elias, a Palestinian exile, creates beauty from damage, playing with the tension between chaos and innocence. This book is a fierce and tender odyssey around the world and deep inside the human psyche." --SYLVIE BAUMGARTEL || Middle East Studies. Palestine Studies. Women's Studies. French Literature. Translation.