A poetry of searing inquisition… The formal liberation of rock flight grants Hourani the freedom to explore lives confined by occupation and structured by multiple layers of oppression: in a persecuted body, with a persecuted identity, in a world defined by borders. … rock flight is asking us to make use of the pages of the book itself—to transform them into a box to model powerlessness, or a rock to throw at intractable political forces.

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.

Hourani wields words with a wise and lyrical precision. Here is a poetry of passion; a poetry of necessity; a poetry of survival, and a poetry-triumphant. This stunning debut is tender yet fierce; devastating, but hopeful. It will tear your heart to pieces, then stitch it back better.

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.

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.

Hourani’s eye-opening debut book of poetry communicates the feelings of dislocation and precarity that have attended his own experiences and that of Palestinians in exile through striking images of movement, migration, and flight.

Hourani grapples with how to find adequate language to confront histories of occupation and genocide: “the more time i spend with words/ the more i realize that they just won’t do.” Amid this seemingly impossible poetic task, formal inventiveness shines; the book borrows from the language of dictionary definitions, multiple choice questions, and instruction manuals, creating an interactive—and haunting—experience.

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.

rock flight asks the reader to get fully physical, to watch, to build, to throw, to remember what it is to have a throat.

Hourani’s poetic power lies in his knack for shifting language as though between states of matter.

This is a book that changes the poetic landscape and makes ground for genuine revolution.