rock flight

Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry

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

rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five 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

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living in Warrane-Sydney. His work has been published in Meanjin, Overland, Australian Poetry and Cordite, among others. He is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre's Next Chapter Scheme and his 2021 essay, 'when we blink' was shortlisted for The LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction prize and published in their 2022 anthology, Against Disappearance.

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