Outside the Joy is filled with poems that sear with lyric clarity about grief, love, survival, and wonder amid personal loss and environmental collapse.

Tracing losses both interpersonal and universal from a mother's failing heart to environmental and economic decline ravaging ancestral homelands OUTSIDE THE JOY is a compendium of abundance in a world rife with want.With a voice as singular as it is illuminating, Awad explores the sharp contrasts of our shared existence: the human capacity to hurt and to hold one another, the love and grief that grow from our ephemeral connectedness.These poems unearth the sacred in the ordinary and invite you to do the same "if only / you'll let the world / soften you with its touching."


"What a gift to be haunted by these words."-MaggieSmith,New York Timesbestselling author ofYou Could Make This Place Beautiful