rock flight

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

Rights 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.

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

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

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