UpSet Press has restored to print Suheir Hammad's first book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black, originally published by Harlem River Press in 1996. The new edition is augmented with a new author's preface, and new poems, under the heading, The Gaza Suite, as well as a new publisher's note by Zohra Saed, an introduction by Marco Villalobos, and an afterword by Kazim Ali.

Fiery words from a Palestinian-American poet on what it means to be a woman of color in a racist society. In May I Take Your Order? she writes: "I'm the main dish / walking down the street / my face a menu / of first world delicacies ... men suck my titties in / eyes poppin out big business heads / lickin their lips against / my thighs like I was some / cafe au lait ice cream."

Rifqa is Mohammed El-Kurd’s debut collection of poetry, written in the tradition of Ghassan Kanafani’s Palestinian Resistance Literature. The book narrates the author’s own experience of dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah--an infamous neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestine, whose population of refugees continues to live on the brink of homelessness at the hands of the Israeli government and US-based settler organizations. The book, named after the author’s late grandmother who was forced to flee from Haifa upon the genocidal establishment of Israel, makes the observation that home takeovers and demolitions across historical Palestine are not reminiscent of 1948 Nakba, but are in fact a continuation of it: a legalized, ideologically-driven practice of ethnic cleansing.

Brooklynite Hammad may be the first Palestinian-American to make it big in the spoken-word, or performance poetry, scene: she took part in Russell Simmons's Tony Award-winning Def Poetry Jam and has read on (among other venues) National Public Radio. Her first collection is also the first book from the Cypher imprint, edited by spoken-word elder statesman Willie Perdomo. Inspired both by her links to the Arab world and by the styles and stances of such earlier poet-performers as Nikki Giovanni, Hammad celebrates and defends her heritage ("i want to be open and hide/ the children of Palestine within me") and can be equally passionate about daily life in her home borough: "if you can make it here/ you got nothing to fear," the poem called "brooklyn" says. With the book comes a CD of Hammad in energetic performance, including a brief interview with the poet's father (subject of her poem "daddy's song") and, apparently, a bag of the Mideastern spice zataar. Leading off the CD is one of Hammad's best poems, the ironic "mic check," whose title refers to sound equipment and to an airport search performed by a hapless guy named Mike. (Jan.).--

What does freedom look like from inside an Israeli prison? The walls of the cell are etched with the names of the prisoners who came before. A bird perches on the cell window and offers a deal: "You bring the pencil, and I will bring the stories," stories of family, of community, of Gaza, of Palestine. Mohammad Sabaaneh brings uses his striking linocut artwork to help the world see Palestinian people as human, not as superheroes or political symbols.

As a young Palestinian woman raised in Brooklyn, during the rise of crack and Hip Hop, Suheir developed her own ideas of what words such as "race" and "culture" meant to her. Drops of This Story is her young soul in words. Readers will feel the growing paints of the young woman of color as she tries to write herself into existence.

Poetry. In BREAKING POEMS Suheir Hammad departs from her previous poetry books with a bold and explosive style to do what the best poets have always done: create a new language. Using "break" as a trigger for every poem, Hammad destructs, constructs, and reconstructs the English language for us to hear the sound of a breath, a woman's body, a land, a culture, falling apart, broken, and put back together again. "Suheir Hammad's BREAKING POEMS introduces English to an Arabic vernacular that startles into being an altogether new language, bridging the archipelago of a Palestine under siege to the diaspora and beyond, breaking through convention, breaking open locks on mind and heart, breaking into a music inspired by the Coltranes, Sun Ra and free jazz, Lee Scratch Perry and Ravi Shankar, a music that is at once a joyous celebration of survival and a poignant cri de Coeur that cannot be ignored and that Mahmoud Darwish should have lived to see. This is a poetry written for people who have endured the winds of hurricanes and invasions. What wisdom, energy, joy and poignancy Hammad brings to the page—for all of this, and for teaching me a new speaking, I give her my thanks"—Carolyn Forché.

A frank and entertaining memoir, from the daughter of Edward Said, about growing up second-generation Arab American and struggling with that identity. The daughter of a prominent Palestinian father and a sophisticated Lebanese mother, Najla Said grew up in New York City, confused and conflicted about her cultural background and identity. Said knew that her parents identified deeply with their homelands, but growing up in a Manhattan world that was defined largely by class and conformity, she felt unsure about who she was supposed to be, and was often in denial of the differences she sensed between her family and those around her. The fact that her father was the famous intellectual and outspoken Palestinian advocate Edward Said only made things more complicated. She may have been born a Palestinian Lebanese American, but in Said’s mind she grew up first as a WASP, having been baptized Episcopalian in Boston and attending the wealthy Upper East Side girls’ school Chapin, then as a teenage Jew, essentially denying her true roots, even to herself—until, ultimately, the psychological toll of all this self-hatred began to threaten her health. As she grew older, making increased visits to Palestine and Beirut, Said’s worldview shifted. The attacks on the World Trade Center, and some of the ways in which Americans responded, finally made it impossible for Said to continue to pick and choose her identity, forcing her to see herself and her passions more clearly. Today, she has become an important voice for second-generation Arab Americans nationwide.

This book is the first full-length study of the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. Based on recently declassified Israeli, British and American state and party political papers and on hitherto untapped private papers, it traces the stages of the 1947-9 exodus against the backdrop of the first Arab-Israeli war and analyses the varied causes of the flight. The Jewish and Arab decision-making involved, on national and local levels, military and political, is described and explained, as is the crystallisation of Israel's decision to bar a refugee repatriation. The subsequent fate of the abandoned Arab villages, lands and urban neighbourhoods is examined. The study looks at the international context of the war and the exodus, and describes the political battle over the refugees' fate, which effectively ended with the deadlock at Lausanne in summer 1949. Throughout the book attempts to describe what happened rather than what successive generations of Israeli and Arab propagandists have said happened, and to explain the motives of the protagonists.

Palestinian political cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh has gained renown worldwide for his stark black-and-white drawings that express the numerous abuses and losses that his countrymen suffer under Israel's occupation and celebrate their popular resistance. This collection includes 180 of Sabaaneh's best cartoons, including some depicting the privations he and other Palestinian political prisoners have suffered in Israel's many prisons. This book offers profound insights into the political and social struggles facing the Palestinian people and a pointed critique of the inaction or complicity of the "international community." Veteran graphic artist Seth Tobocman contributes a foreword.