Strip

Winner of the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, Jessica Abughattas's Strip is a captivating debut about desire and dispossession and that tireless poetic metaphorthe 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."The mystery that Abughattas composes is always moving toward an impossible freeing of the self from its numerous frames. Yet frame by frame . . . she suspends our disbelief, catalogs those potentialities in an America always ready to shoot, direct, and produce the film of itself. Strip is 'in love with possibility,' 'in praise of here I am, here I've been,' USA style. Strip celebrates the bodyits rise and fall, ebb and flow, in a carnival of partiesrestlessly, shamelessly, searching for a way out.... Even as Abughattas claims that 'I can't believe sometimes I have a body,' her poems teem with an...