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The Knives We Need
Poetry, 64 pages February 2021
Carnegie Mellon University Press
ISBN: 9780887486678
Bookshop | University of Chicago
The Knives We Need is a settler-colonial coming of age, set in landscapes in Palestine and the United States. In short, iterative lyric poems, Nava EtShalom combs through disastrous settler genealogies. Wittily, meticulously, the collection unpicks the stitches of nationalism, sees its costs sidelong, and goes looking for another kind of home.
"I never made anything / but a concession to thunder,” writes Nava EtShalom. Her poem-making in The Knives We Need is urgent, spare, passionate, mysterious. Hers is a voice of prophecy reverberating with the thunder of old patriarchal sins, the Binding of Isaac, stolen land, suicide, mourning, a saving disobedience. These wise, beautiful poems count gaps and gashes, and from the fracture, draw new wholeness, a healing art.
—Rosanna Warren