Dark Star Requiem By Hind Shoufani
Dark Star Requiem by Hind Shoufani
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A fearless and luminous collection, Dark Star Requiem is a requiem for the living; a book that mourns and celebrates in equal measure. Shoufani, a Palestinian American poet and filmmaker, writes with breathtaking precision about exile, inheritance, desire, and the endurance of art. The poems speak to displacement and devotion, to the ache of remembering and the necessity of forgetting. They move with cinematic scope and visceral detail, carrying us from the streets of Beirut and Damascus to the subways of London and New York. They ask: What does it mean to love amid ruin? How do we speak when the world falls silent? Each poem becomes an act of witness and resistance, a reclamation of the body and the land. In Shoufani’s hands, language becomes a landscape of resistance.
This collection speaks directly to our moment of despair and insists that beauty, however fragile, still matters. In lush and exacting language, Dark Star Requiem explores how art endures when everything else is gone. It reminds us that the work of poetry is not only to mourn but to build something new in the ruins.
Praise
"We keep the cells of all those we loved in us." Hind Shoufani is multitudes. She's a chorus of pulsing anthems, a crowd of exquisite children weeping on rubble, planting new seeds, staggering onward. This astonishing book of love/grief/rage is a full-bodied wail of care. Intimate, yet collective, Hind Shoufani has an immense cinematic gift for creating potent scenes and histories - these are devastating, brilliant poems.
- Naomi Shihab Nye, Author of The Tiny Journalist and Habibi
Against a compressed, dare I say cleansed or sanitized, lyricism typical of the Anglophone poetry world, Hind Shoufani has gifted us an abundant, generous debut. Here are poems that dream "beyond sonic comprehension," that attempt crafting forms of memory capable of holding the totality of Palestinian life beyond the ways we have been paved over by empire. This is a book to be read slowly, as a tender companion on this long struggle we are suspended in. Capacious in both grief and promises of return, unafraid to name the difficult exhaustions, Dark Star Requiem still manages to imagine a love better than failed healing -- a love that ends, as it begins, in flaring. There is no better word I can think of: alive. These poems are surging and insurgently, airy and breathlessly, tenderly and devastatingly alive.
- George Abraham, Author of Birthright
The free form of Hind Shoufani's poems mirrors the essence of diasporic life. Dark Star Requiem is an exquisite series of shattered fragments; elucidations of moments of intimacy and loss returned to in memory. An erotic pulse courses through it with love, beauty, connection being sought and found in the most unexpected encounters. Defiant and resolute, the collection proclaims the possibilities of finding union in dispersal, love in the ashes and freedom no matter where it is denied.
- Selma Dabbagh, Writer and Editor of We Wrote In Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers
Hind Shoufani makes sorrow into fire. Her collection of poems is an epic journey across borders, bearing witness from afar to over a decade of unrivaled upheaval in her native Syria and Palestine. Hers is the pen of a diasporic writer through and through, always out of place and at home all at once. Hind's poems house echoes of exile and return - of deep empathy, wandering wit, and laser-guided rage.
Ismail Khalidi, Playwright and Author of Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi
About the Author
Hind Shoufani is a Palestinian American filmmaker and writer based in New York. A Fulbright scholar and MFA graduate in Filmmaking from NYU, she was a writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2011. Her film work has gained international recognition, including a BAFTA and an Academy Award nomination for the short film The Present. Over her 27-year career, she has directed, produced, and edited hundreds of documentaries and experimental films. Her feature documentary Trip Along Exodus was shown in more than 40 cities, and she recently produced the Palestinian film Heavy Metal, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous international publications. For nearly two decades, she has curated Poeticians, a collective of poets and musicians performing in Beirut, Amman, Dubai, and Brooklyn. She is currently working on her second Palestinian feature film.
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Bibliographic Information
ISBN: 978-1-939728-72-2
PUBLICATION DATE: October 15, 2025
AUTHOR: Hind Shoufani