Poetry Across Borders
This week we're writing to you from the International Book Fair in Sharjah, as guests of the Sharjah Book Authority. Our special thanks go to our new good friends Moza Al Rand and Mohammad Al Houli, with whom we have been working these last few months and to their team for the warm welcome and friendship.
We've been enjoying so many wonderful and exciting conversations from all over the world, and have been reminded of how literature and poetry are so often about the opening of doors, crossing borders of language, culture, and geography, to connect hearts and minds in distant places. Poetry remains, for us, a universal language of love, healing, and connection. It offers us ways to represent our values with nuance, through tone and selection, when direct conversation isn’t possible. In fact, the beauty of poetry is its ability to speak in metaphor and with longing, often sidestepping censors and reaching people in ways politics cannot. Poetry holds complexity, invites connection, and amplifies the voices too often unheard. Book fairs, too, have long been places of cross-pollination, where ideas travel across languages and borders. We’re proud to be part of that living exchange.
Through these conversations, we continue to believe that engagement through literature is one of the most powerful ways to imagine other ways of being. And we’re grateful that the Poetry Pharmacy can play a small part in that ongoing, borderless dialogue.
   
We want to celebrate voices that defy boundaries - poems shaped by movement, memory, and resilience. Among them is Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian poet from Gaza, whose work speaks of home, exile, and the endurance of the human spirit. His words remind us that even in the face of displacement and loss, language can still hold space for hope, empathy, and belonging. He is the author of Forest of Noise and Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won an American Book Award.
Our subject line this week comes from his poem 'Daughter'.
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