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 colonial rule.
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.
Purchase You Can Be the Last Leaf here. All proceeds go to Mohammed’s family.
“The poems in You Can Be the Last Leaf are told in vignettes, addresses, and near aphorisms. They chronicle the intimate, the sensual worlds that churn despite a colonial cruelty bored with itself—the worlds of children and lovers, diseases and flesh. Frank, wry, devastating, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s work is an absolute gift to behold, crystalline in Fady Joudah’s translation, renewing my faith in language and the houses it can build. This is a powerful introduction to a poet who knows, ‘They will fall in the end, / those who say you can’t.’”
-Solmaz Sharif
“Maya’s poetry is breathtaking in its specificity and rendering of heart, land, loss, and love alike.”
-Hala Alyan
“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
“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
