Synopses & Reviews
"Joudah's poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions."The Guardian
Emerging in the era of tweets and text messages, poet Fady Joudah has invented a new poetic form: textu. The "u" in textu echoes the one in haiku, and also emphasizes the intimate you. A textu poem has a single rule: be exactly 160 characters long. As theme, form, and style are wide opened, a textu reveals new possibilities and poetry in unexpected ways.
Textu
Your spine a river into the forest
can't tell the neurons for the trees
I light and light
you up with sound profile
threading the image habit
of pleasure
Conscience
When we learn how an infant in the womb
Sleeps precisely in a parent's pose
say with fist closed
pillowing the temple
What will become
of the poem
Fady Joudah is a poet, translator, and emergency room physician. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He lives near Houston, Texas.
Synopsis
Emerging in the era of text messages and tweets comes a dynamic new poetic formthe 160-character, haiku-like "textu"
About the Author
Fady Joudah: Fady Joudah is a poet, translator, and emergency room physician. Born in Austin, Texas, and the son of Palestinian refugees, he was raised in Libya and Saudi Arabia. Joudah received his medical training from the Medical College of Georgia and University of Texas, and has traveled the world with Doctors Without Borders, providing medical assistance to those harmed by violence and catastrophe. His first book,
The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Louise Glück. In 2010 he received a PEN translation award for his translations of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.