A book with a hole in it - Kamelya Omayma Youssef

Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s A book with a hole in it uses the poetry of the fragment and the language of everyday survival to gesture towards the fallibility of language at the juncture of the multiple, intersecting wars on women, on "terror," on the non-White body, and on people and language in diaspora. Drawn from a set of journals written over a four-month period, A book with a hole in it throws the formal, official work of poetry into relief, asking what knowledge exists beyond knowledge, which silences are too deep to be surfaced on the page, and how to pierce through trauma and violence to approach a politics of redemption.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef's A book with a hole in it is the 2020 Carolyn Bush Award recipient.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef is the author of A book with a hole in it (Wendy's Subway, 2022), which won the Carolyn Bush Award and later earned an Arab American Book Award for Poetry. She is a text and performance worker who teaches, edits, performs, and organizes events in Detroit, NY, and elsewhere. Her work is published by 1080Press, Mizna, Sukoon, The Margins, Poem-a-Day and elsewhere. 

Passage Series #5
Softcover, 176 pages, 5.12 x 7.8 inches
ISBN: 978-1-7359242-9-8
Design by Rissa Hochberger
Printed in Italy
Edition of 1,000
December 2022 (First Edition)
Sold out
March 2025 (Second Edition)