Fady Joudah

Fady Joudah is the author of […], a 2024 finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize. He has also published six 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; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

The Floor Is Yours

– Fady Joudah

My chicken pox hotel
your machine gun pointillism

My bamboo branch severed but nimble name
in the air of two alphabets
Picassos in bull-light routine

Your mantis welded on a pole
with a spiral staircase
my romance between pillager and villager

timed & timely intensity
inversely proportional to frequency

the chickadees in my voice
the thrush in your mouth

our polymers of I skipping
their archipelago stones

Your touchscreen
my ringtone heart

Your mahogany gift bag
puffed with confetti

my songs to appear as gauze
for a new island

Published in Poetry (January, 2016)

Links

• “Hallways of Dislocation” by Hussein Omar. The Nation. January 14, 2025.
• “Two Palestinian writers on the right to share their stories” by Sandya et al. NPR. October 9, 2024.
• “Fady Joudah: The poet on how the war in Gaza changed his work” by Aria Aber. The Yale Review. February 28, 2024.