Narrative poetry centered on the violent occupation of Palestine

Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a single personal and historical narrative centered on the violent occupation of Palestine. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions, and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within Palestine and across the diaspora. Searing and fierce, tender and pleading, rock flight invites the reader to embark on an exploration of space while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Through the whole, Hourani moves between poetry and prose, historical events and meditations on language, Fluxus-like instruction and interactions with friends, strangers, and family.

As incantatory and stirring as Inger Christensen’s alphabet or Raúl Zurita’s Inri, rock flight adapts themes of displacement and refusal into an interactive reading experience where the book becomes an object in flux.

'Here is a poetry of passion; a poetry of necessity; a poetry of survival, and a poetry-triumphant.' — Maxine Beneba Clarke

'rock flight is a work of timelessness, rigour, precision, relationality and guts – just like its poet. A must-read for all of us who yearn and stretch and reach for a world beyond colonies, and an even more urgent read for those who don’t.' — Alison Whittaker