Lisa Suhair Majaj

Lisa Suhair Majaj (born 1960) is a Palestinian-American poet and scholar.

Quotes

 * My writing process is generally a bit haphazard. I carry notebooks around to capture ideas, observations, phrases, images, chunks of freewriting. I shift to the computer to do more substantive writing and work on craft issues. I always generate multiple drafts of pieces (keeping all drafts in a separate folder), and often experiment with form in different versions to see what fits the text best.
 * Interview with LitHub


 * I find inspiration in anything that sparks attention and emotion and associations—an object, a news article, a natural scene, a sound, an odor. Going for walks sharpens my awareness as well as freeing my mind to wander. I think losing my parents so early, and keeping so many mementos from them around me in my daily life, helped shape my understanding of how meaning is embedded in the simplest of things. I use potholders my mother crocheted, keep my dad’s paperweight on my desk, and think of them daily.
 * Interview with LitHub

Geographies of Light (2009)
Fragments from the poetry collection

and a million memories rustle
 * Now we walk out into the tunnel of days

the night opens, and all the stars shine out.
 * till the moon rises,

vigilant and weary as hope.
 * The sun will rise again tomorrow,

people, separate elements in a living portrait, outlines smoothed by the forgiving wash of lingering light. Whatever the skins we live in, the names we choose, the gods we claim or disavow, may we be like grains of sand on the beach at night: a hundred million separate particles creating a single expanse on which to lie back and study the stars. And may we remember the generosity of light: how it travels through unimaginable darkness, age after age, to light our small human night.
 * May we all fit together like this: trees, birds, sky,

in battered envelopes, bearing small flames of words.
 * Bless poetry books that cross oceans

for peace: hand clasped in hand firmer than fist on a gun or club, hand raised in greeting stronger than hand raised for violence
 * hopes

with the quiet intensity of growing things, roots planted a long time ago lacing the distances of my heart.
 * Today his words surround me

fitting fragments together along jagged lines to remember you
 * See how we save even the broken bits of pottery,

that what they planted, roots against the drought, would survive?
 * Did my parents know

how the bones lie soft and open only time knitting them shut
 * consider the infinite fragility of an infant's skull,

how it crushes under a single blow- in one moment whole years disappear
 * consider a delicate porcelain bowl

is like the miles starlight travels to reach my dreams.
 * The distance between one breath and another

sort them for seeds to plant pray they root
 * so I hoard memories

and safe: a glass of tea, her brother's baby. Now her hands shake at the weight of a fork.
 * Once she could have held anything steady

glimmering between branches of trees older than any of us.
 * ground resilient beneath our feet, sky

then gave without measuring or counting
 * She took her slice of life

shards of memory smoothed and hoarded, shrapnel griefs, a few regrets?
 * what's left but

years collapsing like an ancient accordion, scraps of memory tucked like torn photographs into the sockets of our eyes?
 * Who knew the past would follow us so far,

of bullets against rock, the way dust rose in the stunned aftershock of silence?
 * Remember the splintered staccato

our selves, to speak our story in a private tongue, the past a shadow in our bones.
 * We learned to let our faces hide

the starting line is always closer than you think.
 * No matter how far you've come, remember:

the first rain
 * soon syllables will fall from her lips

seedling taking delicate hold or a weed choking the tender plants news enters us and puts down roots
 * how a word transforms us

cupped in our palms: the small broken note of freedom.
 * These words are the weight

where this shard of the story will never be told.
 * Part of it hides behind the headlines

Quotes about Lisa Suhair Majaj

 * Lisa Suhair Majaj has one of the most necessary voices writing in the world today. Her exquisite poems sustain and hearten us, lift us out of the morass of deception and delusion. Her images and scenes offer up clean, brave truth. Here is the saving grace of honesty, dignity, and deep compassion. Here is a keen, elegant eye and a care wider than any single horizon.
 * Naomi Shihab Nye