Winner of the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, Jessica Abughattas’s Strip is a captivating debut about desire and dispossession and that tireless poetic metaphor—the body. Audacious and clear-eyed, plainspoken and brassy, Abughattas’s poems are songs that break free from confinement as they span the globe from Hollywood to Palestine.

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Praise for Strip

 

“Just as with the subversive anti-normalization of Shibli’s dual narrative structure, and Arafat’s difficult and generous reckoning with queer familial trauma, I emerge from Abughattas’s Strip feeling not merely seen but understood. These works never shy away from the difficult conversations occurring within our diaspora, but instead confront them head-on and implicate the institutions of language that seek to restrict, overwrite, and disembody Palestinian memory.”

— George Abraham, author of Birthright

“Strip is a stunning debut. Any subject Jessica Abughattas writes about becomes a conundrum in the most beautiful of ways. Her poems are little apertures that open up, slant, and snap shut, all the while singing. How does her work both shatter and sing at once? A brilliant collection by a poet to watch.”

— Victoria Chang, author of Obit

“The poems in Strip are love songs that lay bare the violences and tendernesses of the body. With striking images, with direct and penetrating language, with a strong personal voice, with humor, Jessica Abughattas explores love, lust, loneliness, the lies we tell ourselves, our ‘brief astonishment.’ A wonderful collection you’re going to want to read in one sitting, then read again.”

— Zeina Hashem Beck, author of Louder than Hearts