Fady Joudah's Tethered to Stars: A Celestial Search, BY MARISSA AHMADKHANI |
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Was I ever a moth or you this kind of light? One of us was dying, and one had no wings for the journey back. These lines from the poem “Venus Cycle” highlight the expansiveness of Fady Joudah’s writing in his newest poetry collection, Tethered to Stars. Here, Joudah explores the light and the dark, as well as the seemingly inexplicable attraction that exists between the two. Indeed, much of Joudah’s writing contains both exaltation and mourning—it revels in life while still acknowledging death. With a deftly lyrical voice, Joudah immerses readers in descriptions of the natural world, the physical body, and the internal, emotional reality of the speaker. With poems ranging from the celestial to the earthly, this collection is steadfast in its attempt to understand existence. This collection focuses in part on astrology, containing poems dedicated to the twelve zodiac signs. In these poems, Joudah explores these signs' characteristics, with the tone and subject matter carefully constructed to match what is often associated with each. In “Taurus,” for example, he writes: What is the wavelength of euphoria? What slit diffracts praise? And if I walk away from you is it from the edge of a shallow lake? Here, Joudah utilizes a searching tone and asks questions that are left unanswered. The zigzagged lines and white space highlights this uncertainty as he explores the nature of being human, while also grounding the poem in the earthiness of a shallow lake. Then, in “Leo”—the poem dedicate to the Leo zodiac sign—Joudah writes: The newly formed butterflies would gently ride my exhalations but not all would survive the exodus. You probably wouldn’t either. Your chest might explode or you might implode with asphyxiation. These lines, which are tonally very different from those featured in “Taurus” are fast-paced and full of sensory detail, thus embodying the more fiery nature associated with Leos. Each of these twelve poems connect in that they all explore the nature of life, death, and existence—but each is unique in speaking to a specific astrological archetype. Tethered to Stars does not focus solely on the celestial, though. Instead, the collection explores a wide-array of subjects, including the physical body, racial violence in the United States, and Joudah’s identity as a Palestinian-American. In the poem, “Sandra Bland, Texas,” Joudah focuses on the death of Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in police custody in 2015. Blending his already-established astrological motif with the very real and tragic events surrounding Bland’s death, he writes: It’s clear you’re my pretext, Sandra, you were an Aquarius (my dad is as well), but do zodiacs exist for birth into the afterlife? If so, then on the date your breath no longer tethered your body, you became a Cancer, proliferative, this nation’s sign. Here, Joudah examines the ongoing police brutality against Black Americans. Focusing on Bland’s zodiac sign and how it aligns with the poet's own father's, he begins to pose the question as to what separates Bland and the speaker, and why Bland ultimately died at the hands of police. Deftly switching between direct addresses to Bland and general questions about injustice and equality, Joudah further highlights the arbitrary nature of prejudice and loss, writing, “I asked myself in Darfur, what is the threshold / for suffering to create us equal?” Grappling with these difficult and rhetorical questions is something that Tethered to Stars works to do throughout. While Joudah explores these large, looming topics like life and death, he also somehow manages to toe the line between heartbreak and wry humor. In “The Holy Embraces the Holy,” for example, he weaves together subjects that—while seemingly unrelated—work to highlight the absurdity of existence. He writes: Years passed for years. Into a patient’s room I introduced myself with an apology. For two weeks he’d been a hopeful captive subjected to the merry-go-round of doctors. A dying man with another dead person’s heart that gave him all it could. In these lines, Joudah establishes himself as a physician—his real-life occupation—and describes an interaction between the himself and a dying patient. With a mix of darkness and just a tinge of humor, Joudah tackles the subject of mortality head-on as he describes a “dying man with another dead person’s heart.” These lines directly address the cyclicality of life as well as our unfathomable links to one one another and highlight some of the major themes this collection explores. So much of Tethered to Stars grapples with what is difficult to understand. From the nature of stars to racial tension, mortality, and his own cultural heritage, Joudah uses his lyricism to attempt to uncover life's mysteries. This collection deals with these complex and inexplicable topics, and yet it does so in a way that never abandons its tenderness, curiosity, and admiration for the beauty of the world. Despite life’s hardships, Joudah insists that “a life is wasted / that did not love, / so how can we perish?” ⋆ |
Marissa Ahmadkhani (Assistant Editor) holds an MA in English from Cal Poly SLO and splits her time between the Bay Area and Costa Mesa, CA. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, the minnesota review, Radar Poetry, and poets.org, where she received the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2015 and 2017. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at the University of California, Irvine and serves as Assistant Editor of The West Review.
Fady Joudah is an Editor-at-Large for Milkweed Editions. He has published five collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and, most recently, Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.
Fady Joudah is an Editor-at-Large for Milkweed Editions. He has published five collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and, most recently, Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.