120 pages // Released February 28th 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR 2022 ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE ONDAATJE PRIZE
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY SPRING 2021 RECOMMENDATION
ONE OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH'S BEST POETRY BOOKS 2021
Yousif M Qasmiyeh's Writing The Camp is an exceptional, essential collection drawn from the poet's experience of the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon. The poetry moves beyond the observational into a philosophical meditation on the existential nature of place. Qasmiyeh asks "Where is time?", crossing footprints of Derrida, "To experience is to advance by navigating, to walk by traversing". Writing The Camp is a brave and beautiful work, one which will surely be of historical importance.
Praise for Writing the Camp:
“Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s Writing the Camp is a book with which every reader needs to be in dialogue, carrying it in their heart or on their back as a perpetual interlocutor. Qasmiyeh’s vast and cohesive philosophy of being, time, encounter, and place answers and displaces more comfortably established thinkers. Grounded in the exact and intimate knowledge of the camp, these writings acknowledge and refuse to rest with anguish or particularity, the archive or the universal. The fragment always has the integrity of the sequence. Here is dwelling, questioning, and life. This is what we have to consider if we are considering humanity, or modernity. This is a book to love.”
- Anthony Vahni Capildeo
“Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s Writing the Camp is a profound meditation on time, family and language, set in his native Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon by a poet with a rare gift for universal imagery and reflection. It is a sustained concentration on a nexus of crucial issues: dividing thresholds, human touch, place. For a comparison in English we might turn to the range of Blake’s Auguries of Innocence. It is an extraordinary achievement in our time.”
- Bernard O’Donoghue
“In Writing the Camp, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s ambitious and memorable sequence attends to the overheard cry, the inflicted wound, the worn threshold of home, the treachery of words. In a language forged of psalmodic music and prophetic enigmas, Qasmiyeh takes us into a metaphysical space of dislocation where love, courage and hope light flares in the darkness.”
- Marina Warner
ABOUT Yousif M. Qasmiyeh:
Born and educated in Baddawi refugee camp, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh is a poet and translator whose doctoral research at the University of Oxford examines containment and the archive in ‘refugee writing’. Time, the body, and ruination inform his poetry and prose, which have appeared in journals including Modern Poetry in Translation, Stand, Critical Quarterly, GeoHumanities, Cambridge Literary Review, PN Review, Poetry London and New England Review. Yousif is the Creative Encounters Editor of the Migration and Society journal, and his collection, Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize.
