Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine’s Poet and the Other as the Beloved focuses on Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), whose poetry has helped to shape Palestinian identity and foster Palestinian culture through many decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Dalya Cohen-Mor explores the poet’s romantic relationship with “Rita,” an Israeli Jewish woman whom he had met in Haifa in his early twenties and to whom he had dedicated a series of love poems and prose passages, among them the iconic poem “Rita and the Gun.

This remarkable collection of poems, meditations, fragments, and journal entries was Mahmoud Darwish’s last volume to come out in Arabic. This River is at once lyrical and philosophical, questioning and wise, full of irony, resistance, and play.

Mahmoud Darwish is a literary rarity: at once critically acclaimed as one of the most important poets in the Arabic language, and beloved as the voice of his people. A legend in Palestine, his lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren.

Heralding a new period of creativity, In the Wake of the Poetic explores the aesthetics and politics of Palestinian cultural expression in the last two decades.