A Library Journal Best Book of Poetry of 2021

A collection born of polyphony and the rhythms of our cosmos-intimate in its stakes, celestial in its dreams.

Tethered to Stars inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire. With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Fady Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human: "We are other worms / for other silk roads." The solemn, the humorous, the erotic, the transcendent-all of it, in Joudah's poems, steeped in the lexicon of the natural world. "When I say honey," says one lover, "I'm asking you whose pollen you contain." "And when I say honey," replies another, "you grip my sweetness / on your life, stigma and anthophile."

Teeming with life but tinged with a sublime proximity to death, Tethered to Stars is a collection that flows "between nuance and essentialization," from one of our most acclaimed poets.

About the Author
Fady Joudah has published four collections of poems, The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; and, most recently, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the coeditor and cofounder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

Reviews
Praise for Tethered to Stars

"This is what we have had to do, amid pandemic, grief, political chaos, fires, human rights disasters: continue on with our lives. Doing chores ... taking walks ... teaching kids ... trying to stay steady. In his brilliant forthcoming book, Tethered to Stars, Fady Joudah writes about the mysterious cosmos swirling with intricate linkages - as his phone is pinging. Ah, yes, Jerusalem, the Holy City! Right now, let's call all our cities holy. Let's hope our trees continue to communicate, whatever humans can or can't accomplish."-Naomi Shihab Nye, New York Times Magazine

"True to its title, Joudah's collection of poems musically connects the body to the Earth and the Earth to the stars . . . It's earthy and ethereal, as we are."-Houston Chronicle

"Joudah centers his fifth poetry collection on the 12 star signs and other astrological phenomena, blending his physician's penchant for precision and the poet's ear for lyricism . . . What shines most brightly here is Joudah's ability to render extended imagery that plays out over several poems. An uprooted oak in one poem creates a place to plant olive pits in another. Dandelion and sunflower florets populate the pages. Butterflies lay eggs in lemon trees and enchant speakers from afar . . . Another stellar entry in this poet's expansive body of work."-Booklist

"This is a treatise on cosmic unity that does not shy away from grief, but that yearns for the immense, abstract sense of possibility, believing that 'a heart remains a heart in its beyond' . . . The clarity of Joudah's imagery is countered by a complex choral voice that feels at turns analytical and biblical in its rise and fall. Each poem seems to be spoken from various perspectives, the roving voices echoing and replacing one another in their observations until both the speaker and addressee dissolve. 'You'll be everywhere,' one poem closes. Joudah offers a nuanced vision of what connects man to the cosmos in this deeply searching book."-Publishers Weekly

"The poems in this brilliant book themselves stand beside our own sadnesses and grow large in our imaginations, like trees. . . These poems, many among Joudah's finest so far, are as intimate as the night sky."-McSweeney's

"So much of Tethered to Stars grapples with what is difficult to understand. From the nature of stars to racial tension, mortality, and his own cultural heritage, Joudah uses his lyricism to attempt to uncover life's mysteries. This collection deals with these complex and inexplicable topics, and yet it does so in a way that never abandons its tenderness, curiosity, and admiration for the beauty of the world."-The West Review

"The poems in Fady Joudah's Tethered to Stars reflect a poet's pinnacle, where readers experience the vision of a virtuosic poet who possesses multiple registers and allusive riches, transforming them into a polyphonic symphony."-Deema K. Shehabi, Michigan Quarterly Review

Praise for Fady Joudah

"Joudah's poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions."-The Guardian

"A luminous aesthete who thinks in nuance, in refinements."-Louise Glu ck

"Joudah has been writing essential poetry for some time . . . forging a lyric that works at the crosscurrents of reportage, myth, and dream where falsely imagined boundaries of gender, nation, family fray and unfold. . . . Joudah's gifts for articulating the intersections of bewilderment, tenderness, rage, and grief are fully alive." Mary Szybist

"If you love poetry, or simply wonder what powerful poetry is and what it can do for you, then the poems of Fady Joudah are waiting for you."-Rowan Ricardo Phillips

"With a quiet certainty, Joudah names those ordinary things that hold everything in focus, grounded in a fabular mystery that resonates in the twenty-first century."-Yusef Komunyakaa

"Joudah's poems defy classification, not because they perplex, but because of their remarkable power of synthesis. His mode is the lyric, with its concinnity and necessary music, but his lyrics compress, contain and then liberate the matter of narrative: allegory, fable, folktale, parable, documentary. He is a superb, seductive storyteller."-Marilyn Hacker

"Joudah examines his subject with an eye both clinical and caring, alert to the symptoms we don't recognize or won't admit we have. His language is like crystal: patterned, prismatic, sharp."-Evie Shockley

"Joudah is uniquely capable of crafting language that moves fluidly between lyrical abstraction and clinical precision . . . Like the stars its title invokes, Joudah's latest is mysterious and ruminative."-Library Journal, Starred Review

"Joudah's mission is perhaps to spiritualize our minds, and to catch the heart in its deepest modes of thinking, and the outcome is lyric of the highest order." Khaled Mattawa

"Joudah uses language both rich and fiercely honed to consider the sweeping universe and our sometimes troublesome place in it."-Library Journal

"A doctor, Joudah reads bodies like texts, illuminating their stories . . . [and] bringing a loving precision to his descriptions."-Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Joudah's poems are driven by a delight in all aspects of language. . . . [This] is the work of a restless poetic mind whose inventive and capacious poems bring wonder and skepticism and incandescent language to bear on questions of human experience."-The Rumpus

"Supple . . . We often say that poetry transforms, but Joudah's verse also transports."-The Millions

"Joudah is a remarkable poet of great intellect and vision. . . . [His] thought-provoking and imaginative juxtapositions shine."-Arkansas International

Book Information
ISBN 9781571315342
Author Fady Joudah
Format Paperback
Page Count 104
Imprint Milkweed Editions
Publisher Milkweed Editions