"The Earth in the Attic reads like a quiet storm of human emotions and experiences. . . . Joudah's poems explore loss, displacement, suffering, and longing. They drift from the personal and specific to the larger stories of peoples and nations that Joudah encounters. . . . [His] unique talent is to offer poetry readers a look at a wounded and fractured world through his eyes."-Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Institute for Middle East Understanding

Winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, 2007

In The Earth in the Attic, Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American physician, explores big themes-identity, war, religion, what we hold in common-while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Gluck describes the poet in her Foreword as "that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas." She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, "These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget."

About the Author
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American medical doctor and has served as a field member of Doctors Without Borders. He has published six volumes of poetry and translated several collections, including Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me. His prizes and awards include the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize. He lives in Houston, TX.

Reviews
"The Earth in the Attic reads like a quiet storm of human emotions and experiences. . . . Joudah's poems explore loss, displacement, suffering, and longing. They drift from the personal and specific to the larger stories of peoples and nations that Joudah encounters. . . . Joudah's unique talent is to offer poetry readers a look at a wounded and fractured world through his eyes."-Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Institute for Middle East Understanding

Finalist for the 2008 Book of the Year Award, presented by ForeWord magazine

"The Earth in the Attic underscores Fady Joudah's great talent for exacting naked feelings that engage the age-old mysteries of this world, while maintaining a levelheaded residence amidst the everyday vagaries of modern life. The poems here radiate from the personal out into the larger world, propelling along moments of light and transcendence. With a quiet certainty, Fady Joudah names those ordinary things that hold everything in focus, grounded in a fabular mystery that resonates in the twenty-first century."-Yusef Komunyakaa





Book Information
ISBN 9780300134315
Author Fady Joudah
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Yale University Press
Publisher Yale University Press
Weight(grams) 181g
Dimensions(mm) 241mm * 149mm * 6mm