Review: Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance: Poems

Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance: Poems by Fady Joudah
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I just returned home from AWP in Tampa. While there, I attended a reading of Milkweed poets, including Fady Joudah. I returned to my hotel room and discovered that one of the galleys of poetry I had for books coming out this next week was the same guy! Cool.

I was surprised to find out that Joudah is a doctor of internal medicine, and also a poet. There are moments in these poems where it is almost as if you see through his doctor's perspective, with skin abrasions and cadavers, disease and corpses. The body, but from a distance. Other moments, the body is close and intimate, or something that can cause violence or pain.

There is also a section of poems written in collaboration with Golan Haji, a Syrian Kurdish poet, whose book of poems I just happened to buy from AWP before going to this reading. What are the odds?

My favorites include:

"The Magic of Apricot" (rather than the madeleine as memory....)

"Epithalamion" (which means a poem celebrating a marriage, and it is lovely)

"The Sole Witness to My Despair, Declare"

"Traditional Anger (in the Sonora)"

"Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance"

I'm not a huge fan of the paragraph poem, but enjoyed "Palestine, Texas" when he read it to the group.

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