This poem is taken from PN Review 226, Volume 42 Number 2, November - December 2015.
A Novelist Can’t Finish Her Debut Novel
1. Gaza, August 2014
A novelist in terror of her characters
coming to life and dying again in Ramallah
under a plague of rockets from Tel-Aviv
can’t finish her book. Cutting-edge TV
in which the Channel 4 News
is like a nightly accusation of abuse
destroys her; information; abstract concretes;
funeral riots in the narrow streets,
ginnels of the international city;
the over-complication of complicity…
There is no current situation in her book.
In other news, General Mubarak
said that today’s peace talks have been hijacked.
If the first casualty of war is fact
its final arbiter is fiction.
...
A novelist in terror of her characters
coming to life and dying again in Ramallah
under a plague of rockets from Tel-Aviv
can’t finish her book. Cutting-edge TV
in which the Channel 4 News
is like a nightly accusation of abuse
destroys her; information; abstract concretes;
funeral riots in the narrow streets,
ginnels of the international city;
the over-complication of complicity…
There is no current situation in her book.
In other news, General Mubarak
said that today’s peace talks have been hijacked.
If the first casualty of war is fact
its final arbiter is fiction.
...
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