You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine

A bilingual anthology of poems from Palestine (2023-2024), You Must Live attests to existence in the face of suppression.

Bearing witness to the realities of the Palestinian genocide, You Must Live is a bilingual anthology of recent poetry from Gaza and the West Bank. Translated from Arabic and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, this collection gathers the voices of poets currently living in Palestinian territory, most of whom have never left. Yet the poems in You Must Live refuse to cast their speakers as perpetual victims. Diverse voices and styles shine throughout-powerful, prayerful, theatrical, and even humorous--as poets write love letters to the landscape, elegies for martyrs and homes, and proclamations for the future. Negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, You Must Live sounds as an urgent call to the global community.

Sherah Bloor is a South African poet and scholar. Her first poetry collection, The Gathering, an epic in cantos, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in Fall 2026. She is currently working on a second collection, tentatively titled Archives of the Free World. Having studied philosophy and social theory in Australia, she is completing a doctorate at Harvard University in philosophy of religion on the medical history of the mystical and poetic imagination. Sherah is also the editor-in-chief of Harvard Divinity School’s literary and arts journal, Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image, and Sound (Harvard University Press). Her own poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Dialogist, Lana Turner, and Paperbark, among other magazines.

Tayseer Abu Odeh is a Palestinian-Jordanian writer and translator. Among other outlets, his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Arab Studies Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Harvard Divinity School’s Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image, and Sound. He serves as an international advisor on the editorial board ofThe Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies and as a judge for writing competitions, including the Jubilee Institute’s award for creative writing in 2022. Abu Odeh is the recipient of several awards himself, which funded language, social activism, and literature study in Japan and the United States, and recognized outstanding contributions to research, such as a visiting scholar fellowship at the University of California, San Diego, and special recognition at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, from which Abu Odeh received a PhD in English literature and criticism in 2016.