rock flight

Winner of the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry & Mary Gilmore Award

A moving testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Rights to rock flight have been sold by Giramondo to New Directions (US) and Prototype (UK).

rock flight is a book-length poem that, over seven chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. 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 and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.

WINNER: NSW Literary Awards – Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry 2025
WINNER: Mary Gilmore Award 2025
SHORTLISTED: Prime Minister’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2025
SHORTLISTED: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2025
SHORTLISTED: NSW Literary Awards – UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing 2025
SHORTLISTED: Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2025
SHORTLISTED: Michael Murphy Poetry Prize 2025

A conceptually inventive collection that weaves together the political and deeply personal to create a powerful voice speaking against the moral, military and bureaucratic violences of colonialism.
Judges’ comments, NSW Literary Awards

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

rock flight is relentlessly potent. Merging resistance and poetry, Hasib Hourani writes back – against the ‘suffocating state’ and imperial forces. Be ready to be transformed by Hourani’s diasporic anticolonial poetics.
Don Mee Choi

Poetry’s most captivating speech is the apparatus of colonial and administrative language wickedly turned back on itself. This poetry is wicked: a rock, flung whilst studied, signalling hard, unerring and remarkable.
Holly Pester

Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is propelled by urgent anaphoras and compelling fragmented imagery. Scrolling and sprawling across the page and downward and outward, as attempts to articulate and scrawl the horrors facing the Palestinian people. Out of such scrawls are new languages, new refusals.
Victoria Chang

rock flight’s vivid and compelling language places you in the scene of suffering and dares you not to look away…[an] incredible debut.
Ash Davida Jane, Books+Publishing

Fragments collect around a handful of striking images – migratory birds, rocks, boxes – to celebrate Palestinian resilience in the face of ongoing surveillance, displacement and dispossession. Hourani’s language is crystal clear and complex, simultaneously reflecting life in Palestine and his life in Australia. He turns images around, flipping them, moving the reader to see things one way, then another. In rock flight, a rock is a promise, a date seed, a country. And if a box is a thing designed to contain, this poem is the thing that escapes it.
Bec Kavanagh, The Guardian ‘25 Best Books of 2024’

After all the ducks and turns and mental origami – which you begin to do automatically after getting the hang of Hourani’s rhythm – the box this poem creates contains a powerful, shape-shifting gift. The beauty of Hourani’s inventiveness has been in bringing me to feel that Al-Atta’s wind is his breath, which is his rock, which is his flight—which is the inviolable freedom of the Palestinian soul.
Jumaana Abdu, Meanjin

From its opening, rock flight engages two distinct modes: an acutely drawn colonial reality – ‘the reason I am elsewhere’ – and the power of the anti-colonial imagination to resist.
Micaela Sahhar, Overland

Hourani’s poetics are indissolubly bound with the political… Poems deal directly with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. They detail the surveillance technology used to police Palestinians. They document torture techniques used by Israeli forces against Palestinian prisoners. All without losing the artistry and vision of the poet.
Michelle Hamadache, The Conversation

Eye-opening… A thoughtful, provocative, unsettling poetic interrogation into colonialist occupation, exile, and the Middle East.
Diego Báez, Booklist (starred review)

Powerful… Its pages probe the physical and psychological implications of occupation with recurring images and motifs (rocks, boxes and suffocation, among them), and through a poetry of searing inquisition.
Christopher Kondrich, The Washington Post 

An interactive – and haunting – experience… Hourani’s impressive and expansive poems strike a chord.
Publisher’s Weekly

[A] striking debut… [Hourani] proposes a method of writing about, and understanding, dis/location; an awareness of self as subject to forced displacement from one’s homeland.
Godelieve de Bree, Los Angeles Review of Books