TPAN

A book club centred on Palestinian literary excellence

Cost: Free, but books sourced at own cost

Run time: 2 hours

Capacity: 12 participants

This month's book selection: rock flight by Hasib Hourani

*We recommend that participants have finished at least 80% of the book by the meetup date in order to affectively engage in discussions. There is no rule on how you read the book (physical, e-book or audiobook are all acceptable forms of reading)

Where to get it: 

rock flight is currently for sale at Fullers Bookshop and various online retailers. There are ebook versions of this book available also.

About rock flight by Hasib Hourani

Genre: poetry

A moving testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

rock flight is a book-length poem over seven chapters. It follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.

About Hasib Hourani

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living on Wangal Country in Sydney. His work has been published in Meanjin, Overland, Australian Poetry and Cordite, among others. He is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Scheme and his 2021 essay, ‘when we blink’ was shortlisted for The LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction prize and published in their 2022 anthology, Against Disappearance. His debut book is rock flight (Giramondo 2024).