Nathalie Khankan, quiet orient riot

 

said on these storied soils | I don’t spoil any seed | there is no pure race | a bride is still bridal | a checkpoint is STILL TORN HILL | in just a few weeks topographical categories shift & our bodies move toward a lid with a tighter seal | with the hill gone another concrete tower erupts & the militarized sanitized | it’s a border crossing running through continuous land | if i get married i will get stuck here & my wedding thōb against the bodies of busses jamming here | if i bear a child my engorged breasts here | the human count is a crucible

I’m just now going through San Francisco-based poet Nathalie Khankan’s quiet orient riot (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2021), winner of the omnidawn 1^st/2^nd poetry book prize, as judged by Dawn Lundy Martin. “Straddling Danish, Finnish, Syrian and Palestinian homes and heirlooms,” as her author biography describes her, Khankan’s book-length lyric is composed with a wonderfully-delicate urgency, pushing and agonizing across geopolitics and grief, and an attention to lyric flow that is both beautiful and devastating. “there’s no trace of saccharine in the teas of gaza,” she writes, “there is / nowhere safe to hide […]” As Dawn Lundy Martin offers as part of her introduction to the collection:

The search for “little justices” configures one narrative anchor across the book, and when they emerge—these little justices—they do so desperate and breathless as if all existence relies on them. this is because violence and loss permeate the landscape. We understand this from Khankan’s images of grief. They speak to the future of utterance amid chaos. “this is a picture of three men standing up coiling father | his hands empty & empty.” It’s altering to read a world where even the size of justice must be shrunken.

quiet orient riot is composed through fifty-two individual prose lyrics, one to a page, and all seemingly each untitled, until one realizes (through the table of contents) that the titles sit within the body of each poem, almost as though each title sits as a fallen leaf, floating upon the surface of the poem’s small pool. She writes of, as Fady Joudah writes on the back cover, a “Palestinian book in Empire,” writing exile and anticipation, the West Bank and Gaza. In many ways, this is a quiet book that holds incredible power, resonance and urgency, writing out the possibilities of birth in a landscape rife with conflict, suffering and loss; writing out the possibilities of birth while holding to those cultures that surround, whether from outside or within; that particular geography, and the richnessess that live there, all intimately shared with her growing daughter. This book articulates, one might say, a growing hope amid ongoing realities of conflict. Hope, amid the possibility of something further. As she writes, close to the end of the collection:

it's a rain & you were born before it | you were born in your body | just like that | no one refutes these areas were made to carry letters & the | letters lapsed | in a world of fewer babies you were born | dear RIOT COSMOLOGY | i never thought i’d be a national vessel | febrile & inlaid | undulating so | we worked hard to be fruitful & plenty