Speaking to the collection’s patterns and cues/clues are the three sections themselves, the first and third untitled and each consisting of 16 poems. It is the middle section, “Saggital Views,” with its ten poems (or two sets of five) that connects the First and Last Sections. The ‘saggital view’ or ‘saggital plane’ is the anatomical boundary between the left and right sides of the body. “Saggital Views” was co-written with the Syrian Kurdish writer and translator Golan Haj. Countless phrases speak to and reinforce the collection’s focus on communication and its limits/limitations as well as the distortions of what is being or was communicated: “writing may exit the cage but the cage remains and grows…” (“After No Language”). Among the most harrowing: “Last Night’s Fever, This Morning’s Fever,” with its terrifying resonance both in the times in which it unfolds and now, days after the US pulled its troops out of Syria, and with them, its support:
I read your name among the numbered, nearly
called you to console you of your own passing. Thirty
summers ago….
….I waited alone at the bus stop
south of the lone remaining poplar
we buried you under, in what remains
of the courtyard….
Amira, did you hear Jigar’s voice under the rubble?
Is it true the rescuers finished him off, a hospice act
or is he still alive down there? Your death was white
like sleep, like salt, like dust mixed with flour
sacked and loaded on trucks….
Did I tell you what happened to Ali who escaped
Iraq to Syria? His door also killed him….
….In summer
we sing a love song your husband used to sing
in wheat fields. And songs return to children
terrified of trucks and destinies….
Amira, tonight
a moon will rise like a watermelon crescent
a Kurd wishes for his sleeping daughter
just before the story ends.
The poem references Aleppo’s pine alongside Amira’s laugh, both of which are now lost; they survive within a speaker who intimately speaks to a woman recently dead about another fresh tragedy, all the while ferrying across a much longer history of both violence and beauty. The two coexist in Footnotes, though Joudah leaves little doubt as to which will ultimately triumph. After all, here, too, in the poem and in the collection, is the continued, escalating violence in the Middle East engendered, in fundamental ways, by interests from the West.
*