Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s A book with a hole in it uses the
poetry of the fragment and the language of everyday survival to
gesture towards the fallibility of language at the juncture of the
multiple, intersecting wars on women, on "terror," on the
non-White body, and on people and language in diaspora. Drawn from a
set of journals written over a four-month period, A book with a
hole in it throws the formal, official work of poetry into
relief, asking what knowledge exists beyond knowledge, which silences
are too deep to be surfaced on the page, and how to pierce through
trauma and violence to approach a politics of redemption.
Kamelya Omayma
Youssef's A book with a hole in it is the 2020 Carolyn Bush
Award recipient.
