The Earth in the Attic

Book excerpt: Announcing the 2007 recipient of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize Fady Joudah's The Earth in the Attic is the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his poems Joudah explores big themes--identity, war, religion, what we hold in common--while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Gl ck describes the poet in her Foreword as "that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas." She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, "These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget."