Quiet Orient Riot

Book excerpt: Tracing the conception of a child through to her birth, Quiet Orient Riot addresses birth regimes and the politics of reproduction, unspooling the many ways that liturgical commands and an intense demographic anxiety affect a journey towards motherhood. Through these poems, Nathalie Khankan considers what it means to bear a Palestinian child in the occupied Palestinian territory, particularly with a pregnancy enabled through contingent access to Israel's sophisticated fertility treatment infrastructure. The poems confront questions of how to be a national vessel and to bear a body whose very creation is enabled by the pronatalist state, yet not recognized by it While Quiet Orient Riot chronicles a journey that is specific and localized, the larger questions that emerge from these poems reach beyond this particular story. The book asks questions of itself, wondering what kind of language may hold precarious life and what kind of poem may see an unborn body through emergency, diminishment, and into blossoming. Through the trials of pregnancy and birth, demographic and religious imperatives, these poems are concerned with many kinds of worship. They bow to a "chirpy printed sound," "what grows in the rubble," and "the capacity for happiness despite visual evidence." Wherever you look, there are water holes for the thirsty and a grove of "little justices."