One of the foremost Palestinian poets and a major figure in the Arab world, Samih al-Qasim was born in 1939 and experienced the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 first hand, achieving fame as one of the acclaimed “resistance poets” during the 1950s. His first book was published when he was just eighteen, and over the decades he produced a body of work that is as varied and innovative as it is impressive and moving.

Sadder Than Water collects poems from his various periods and modes and makes available to English readers the full range of al-Qasim’s oeuvre, which is characterized by its ironic approach to painfully charged political situations, its melancholy music, and its lyrical evocation of Palestinian heritage. With a new foreword by writer and translator Robyn Creswell.

“The poetry of place, of where the poet lives and of which he knows deeply, could hardly have greater worldwide resonance than in the poetry of Samih al-Qasim…. Prophetic … diamond-bright works.”

Booklist

“[H]is style flowers furiously into a bittersweet and melancholy song.”

John Palattella, The Nation

“Brilliant … youthful and daring.”

Naguib Mahfouz

“When we read his poetry … amid the torrent of despairing poems that poured forth [after 1967] we felt an extraordinary power surging forth … from the depths of despair and misfortune, defying despair and misfortune.”

al-Tariq (Lebanon)

“Al-Qasim’s new poems … are close to the hearts of oppressed people everywhere.”

al-Nahar (Lebanon)

Born in 1939, in Zarqa, Jordan to a Palestinian Druze family from the Galilee, SAMIH AL-QASIM grew up in the village of Rama. The author of over thirty books of poetry, several novels, collections of plays, essays, and criticism, he appeared regularly at literary festivals throughout the Arab world and in Europe. His work has been translated into many languages, and editions of his collected poems have been published in Beirut and Cairo. A resident of Rama until his death in 2014, he remained to the end an outspoken opponent of racism and oppression on all sides of the Middle East conflict.

To watch an interview with Samih al-Qasim from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” click here then click “streaming video.”

NAZIH KASSIS is a lexicographer and translator of contemporary Arabic prose and poetry. He received his doctorate in linguistics from the University of Exeter and has taught English and Arabic at the University of Haifa, the Academic Arab College for Education, and Portland State University. He writes poetry in the local dialect. Born in the Palestinian village of Iqrit in 1944, he has lived in Rama since 1948.

ADINA HOFFMAN’s books include My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century and Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City. A Guggenheim Fellow, she was one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell literary prize.

ROBYN CRESWELL is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut and translator of Arabic prose by Sonallah Ibrahim, and Abdelfattah Kilito. His rendering of The Threshold by Iman Mersal won the National Translation Award in Poetry. Winner of the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, he is the former poetry editor of the Paris Review and teaches comparative literature at Yale.

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