In this episode we talk with poets Noor Hindi and George Abraham about Heaven Looks Like Us, a new anthology of Palestinian poetry they co-edited, forthcoming from Haymarket Books in May 2025. We discuss their process and priorities for this project, which began in 2020 and continues amid the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Noor and George share ways they’ve framed and responded to the challenges and opportunities of anthology editing, and how they’ve grappled with anthologizing’s pitfalls of reduction, representation, canonization, and exclusion. Instead Heaven Looks Like Us is offered as a fresh site of radical connection, newness, abundance, and Palestinian futurity. Under conditions of hyper-visibility, where we see atrocity unfold in real time, what is the role of the book as a technology for interacting, knowing, and imagining deeper? We talk about it, interrogating the roles of institutions and time and money, theorizing strategies for reclaiming those resources and building new structures, amid and through the work of editing. We try to understand what that work even is. Poetry expands the question.
This episode opens with George and Noor reading poems by Jen Siraganian, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (translated by Fady Joudah), and Mira Mattar. The anthology’s title comes from a poem by Fargo Tbakhi. In discussion we quote a poem by Micaela Kaibni Raen. Find George’s poetry collection Birthright here, and here’s Noor’s Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. George is executive editor of the journal Mizna. We also refer to RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers) and some previous anthologies including Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Nathalie Handal’s The Poetry of Arab Women, and Hayan Charara’s Inclined to Speak.
