Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance

Poet, translator, and physician Joudah (Textu) balances cool scientific precision with exceptional openness to mystery and awe in keenly lyrical poems offset by occasional jolts of irony. For Joudah, questions of mortality pervade the daily terrain that he traverses in his writing. As a medical student in anatomy lab, he notes, “I had come across that which will end me, ex-/ tend me, at least once, without knowing it.” Such heightened awareness of human vulnerability suffuses Joudah’s sensibility and informs his approach to all subject matter, which includes considerations of war and displacement, as well as tender exchanges between lovers. There is also playfulness in how Joudah turns the material of contemporary life toward timeless qualities of being: “our polymers of I skipping/ their archipelago stones// Your touchscreen/ my ringtone heart.” Interdependence is evident everywhere, as is the knowledge that “A body exits all pages to be/ inscribed on another, itself.” From this place of shared fragility, Joudah asks, “Sweet clot/ of wakefulness, what is Mercy?” He answers his own question: “To go mad among the mad/ or go it alone.” Joudah’s collection is testament to another state of being in which each poem is an occasion to be awake to the world with clarity and compassion. (Mar.)