Reading this book, one comes to understand that one of the most astounding, paradoxical companions to our grief is precision. Via his very syntax, through the intermingling of silence and sigh, Ahmad Almallah creates a sober and tender and bitter account of a journey that is loss—of one’s beloved, one’s land, one’s hope—and, according to his version of events, it is loss that nurtures, disciplines, and gifts the desire of writing.
—Polina Barskova

Border Wisdom reassembles the loss of a mother, mother tongue, and mother land, and gives pain a passage. These poems, like death, disappear and reappear in a different translation. One that’s at the border of language and breath. One that calls on trees for overtures. And out of wood comes word[s]. The Arabic and English become “windows [that] know something of the hidden world.” These poems are infinite and steadily moving in memory of all that’s gone, and all that will be regained. A piercing collection.
—Nathalie Handal

Ahmad Almallah observes the dust that rises when war and grief collide in the rubble of brief existences made briefer by geopolitical devastations. These poems honor the daily trembling and unexpected questions that accompany the losses of one’s spaces of origin—one’s mother, one’s land, one’s language. I won’t lie and say that it is easy to read this unflinching work, these searing confrontations with the lividity and ferocity of grief. But I admire a poet who is unafraid to rise up and be a pallbearer, who is unafraid to point out the difficulty of holding in our memory what we would rather hold in our arms.
—Divya Victor

While completely blurring the lingual border between Arabic and English and turning the bilingual into an intralingual language of poetry, Almallah offers us a dazzling contemplation on the mother tongue and on transposing that tongue, so naturally, into a second language, making the Arabic of the unconscious glaringly visible on the page, subversively complementing the prevalent English of this poetic Möbius strip.
—Antón Shammás

Almallah’s writing is immensely relevant; we need his voice.
—Naomi Shihab Nye

The problem with poets is that they see everything: the end, the needles, the mother as another. And the brilliance of this collection is that it forges an ethics of grief that challenges human containment, estranging the act of living from the first person and divorcing lyricism from its habitual “you.” Between Arabic and English and without slipping into nostalgia, Almallah crafts a place from which to write where sentiency extends beyond human conventions. And what is more defiant than claiming that what you have lost has also lost you? Than reversing the direction of grief, whereby the living are indebted to the dead and the dead too insist on claiming the living? There is nothing the occupation can do about that.
—Mirene Arsanios, Hyperallergic

Reading Almallah’s haunting collection in 2024, it is impossible not to feel the loss and pain of genocide, the slow violence that unfolds each day with rapid intensity in the Gaza Strip. Border Wisdom grapples with this loss through a bilingual lens of Arabic and English, through life and death that surface with the loss of a mother and a mother tongue: “in this land of new beginnings / I own no language.” Translation and malformations become necessary strategies to refuse linguistic, social, and political borders. “I tell you this translaformation is more accurate a / translation than I ever imagined,” writes Almallah. This collection is a beautiful elegy for a mother and a mother tongue.
—Orchid Tierney, Jacket 2

Border Wisdom is a deeply personal tale of diasporic being at the edge of loss and language. Almallah concludes his collection in a most intimate register: the naming of things—objects—as evidence of the fragmented stories, whole. From keys to chairs to broken fingers of a piano, the poems rewrite the collection’s dilemma, the failure of containment, of holding grief … What Almallah does so beautifully, so hauntingly … is reproduce not only the discussion of the shortcomings of language but the conditions that make it so. His line breaks cut against expectation, his field is vast on the page and his pen quick with subversive movement. In short lines, he argues and argues against, the repetition of his phrases, an echo that vibrates up, up. He grieves and delights, speaks, and silences.
—Sara Abou Rashed, Michigan Quarterly Review