48kg

One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line… What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it, and the result is truly astonishing * Max Porter *
Objects and emotions tangle brilliantly in these searing poems. It’s terrible that Abu Akleen has atrocities to write about, and how well she does it * Caryl Churchill *
Written in Gaza between 2023 and 2025, Abu Akleen’s poems disassemble and painstakingly reassemble the body to interrogate injustice, death and grief. She creates a world where absurdity and reality, irony and humanity coexist—from the ice-cream man crying out ‘corpses for sale’ while noting that ‘no grave buys them,’ to death wanting to have a birthday party and picking ‘an arm the missile hadn’t shattered' .... Throughout 48Kg, Abu Akleen transforms witnessed details into fragile interpretations .... She notes that poetry gives ‘a form to feelings in order to understand them,’ and these heartbreaking and risk-taking poems protest with uncompromising clarity and tenderness against continuing atrocities -- Kit Fan * The Guardian *
Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza's most vivid and unstinting witnesses -- Claire Armistead * The Guardian *
Batool Abu Akleen writes sinuous, urgent, intimately provocative poems that we need. Etel Adnan’s work comes to mind in these poems’ frankness and fervour; and they’re happening today * Eileen Myles *
The poets of Palestine have become vital archivists. In 48Kg Batool Abu Akleen not only provides brute testimony of the Genocide committed by Israel against her people, but by her inventiveness and surreality, by the barbed humour and bitter irony of her voice, and the tender revelation and humane wisdom of her work, she defiantly gives voice and futurity to Palestinian life. She writes that she waits for death, ‘like a mother expecting her newborn’ telling us ‘I will scream / I will feel his head coming out of my body.’ No one should have to write these incredible, haunting lines, but everyone should read them. This is an extraordinary book of poetry * Jack Underwood *
These poems witness dispossession so profound, the poet longs even for certainty that her body will rest in a grave. This searing fact is the heart of 48Kg * Anne Michaels *
Batool Abu Akleen’s roaming verse contemplates whether absurdism is the only language we have left to express this vicious genocide -- Hasib Hourani
Batool Abu Akleen's poetry is both tragic and eloquent. No words can convey Gaza's ordeal, but her spare verses give it a life and meaning beyond words. The lines compel the reader's attention and empathy * Ghada Karmi *
Like lines of Emily Dickinson, Batool Abu Akleen’s astonishing work combines electric imagery with naked-wire directness to say that, when ‘nothing remains but the fire,’ the one thing you can trustis poetry * Ruth Padel *