A Book With A Hole In It: Absence, Form, And Negative Space

Description

Kamelya Omayma Youssef
Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s A book with a hole in it uses the poetry of the fragment and the language of everyday survival to gesture towards the fallibility of language at the juncture of the multiple, intersecting wars on women, on “terror,” on the non-White body, and on people and language in diaspora. Drawn from a set of journals written over a four-month period, A book with a hole in it throws the formal, official work of poetry into relief, asking what knowledge exists beyond knowledge, which silences are too deep to be surfaced on the page, and how to pierce through trauma and violence to approach a politics of redemption.
‘A book with a hole in it is reading as good as thinking. Lines stop ’cause they’re too full, don’t want to say any more, and even in silence the interior is just bursting, the book is so rich. It leads out, proudly, though it pauses first.’ – Eileen Myles

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