Poetry as Resistance: Fargo Tbakhi x Ahmad Almallah

Join us for an evening of poetry, conversation, and community as Fargo Nissim Tbakhi and Ahmad Almallah read from their newly released collections TERROR COUNTER and Wrong Winds. Both works grapple with Palestinian life, memory, and resistance through formally inventive and urgent poetics. All ticket and book sales goes to supporting students from Gaza. Please consider sliding donation for food available that will all go towards the fundraiser.

Ahmad Almallah grew up in Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia. His newest poetry collection, Wrong Winds, is out with Fonograf Editions (2025). His other collections include Border Wisdom (Winter Editions 2023) and Bitter English (Chicago 2019). He is an artist in residence in English and Creative Writing at UPenn. His poems appeared in Poetry, SAND, APR, MQR, Icarus among others. Some of his honors include: a fellowship and residency at Millay Arts, the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize and the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship.

Wrong Winds (Ahmad Almallah)

When genocide is the question, can the answer be anything but wrong? In Wrong Winds, written during the first months of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Palestinian-American poet Ahmad Almallah converses with the screams echoing throughout the West. Traversing European cities, Almallah encounters the impossibility of being a Palestinian, left alone in a world full of sympathizers and enemies. Through a continuous unsettling of words and places, considering the broken voices of Western poetry (Eliot, Lorca, and Celan, among others), the poems in Wrong Winds discover the world again and form an impossible dialogue with the dead and dying.

Praise:

“Wrong Winds is an epitome of poetic labor: a book that teaches the awesome responsibility of being fully human. Ahmad Almallah imagines a language for survival on a planet where people and morality are routinely and casually displaced, and offers pathways for us to come to terms with the world we are creating: a place that contains utmost beauty and unutterable hurt. Long after Palestine is free, these urgent poems will remain touchstones of what counters the degradation of the human spirit.” —Anna Badkhen

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist.

TERROR COUNTER (Fargo Tbakhi)

TERROR COUNTER is a debut collection of poems which acts against the many languages—interpersonal, legal, literary, rhetorical—constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians. Moving through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi here attempts to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood. The voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life. TERROR COUNTER asks: where and how might a Palestinian subject escape the public consumption of American letters? And, ultimately, how can we continue to love each other amidst the endless terror of the colonial world?

Praise:

“In this debut collection electric with grief, rage, and love, Tbakhi enacts the liberatory possibilities of a language reclaimed. This book will crack your heart open. Let it, let the light come pouring in.” —Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, author of Something About Living