You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine

Editors: Sherah Bloor & Tayseer Abu Odeh

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (2025)

Bearing witness to the realities of the Palestinian genocide, You Must Live is a bilingual anthology of recent poetry from Gaza and the West Bank. Translated from Arabic and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, this collection gathers the voices of poets currently living in Palestinian territory, most of whom have never left. Yet the poems in You Must Live refuse to cast their speakers as perpetual victims. Diverse voices and styles shine throughout—powerful, prayerful, theatrical, and even humorous—as poets write love letters to the landscape, elegies for martyrs and homes, and proclamations for the future. Negotiating the interplay between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, You Must Live sounds as an urgent call to the global community.