Some Things Never Leave You - Zeina Azzam
“Azzam writes with heart and with an ear keenly tuned to the rhythms of displacement and loss. Her poems braid sorrow and hope together with the silk thread of her mother’s prayer, “khayr inshallah! Goodness, God willing!” Through her childhood memories in Arab cities to the repeated farewells and departures of exile, Azzam’s poems alternately mourn and celebrate the wonders of life; a child’s fascination with language, the estrangement of a sibling, the sensual pleasures of a resplendent meal, and the promise of renewed love. These poems are “a hedge against hardship,/an incantation” and their music will stay with you.”
—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, author of Kaan and Her Sisters and Water & Salt
ISBN 978-0-9853587-4-22023$18.95Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. She is the Poet Laureate of the City of Alexandria, Virginia, for 2022-2025. Her chapbook, Bayna Bayna, In-Between, was released in 2021 by The Poetry Box. Her poems appear in journals, webzines, and anthologies including Pleiades, Mizna, Gyroscope, Cutleaf Journal, National Academy of Poets Poem-a-Day, Split this Rock, Bettering American Poetry, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Virginia, Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees, Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Gaza Unsilenced. Her commissioned poem, “You Birth the Seeds,” was recently rendered as a four-part choral work by the renowned composer Melissa Dunphy. Zeina’s works can also be found in art gallery catalogues and on public buses in the cities of Alexandria and Arlington, Virginia.
