Passage Series #5

About the book

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.

About the author

Kamelya Omayma Youssef is a writer from Dearborn, Michigan, with roots in Jibbayn and Shmistar, Lebanon. With an MA in English from Wayne State University and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, she currently teaches poetry at the City College of New York, edits poetry manuscripts, and co-facilitates Habibi Futurism, a generative workshop for collective futurist imaginings.