The title of this collection of poems by the Palestinian-American poet comes from the poet’s first twitter account follow, and the reason for her creating her own twitter handle, Janna Jihad, an (then) eleven year old Palestinian journalist and witness to her people’s oppression at the hands of the Right-led (read here as Netanyahu) Israeli government.
The poems then circulate around this tiny observer’s perpsective while also asking leading and damning questions about the exercise of power and oppression on a people. The poems are sometimes short, pithy and often cutting remarks, while other times they longer and more fully fleshed out examinations of loss, pain, and suffering.
There’s also several direct comments and statements to Netanyahu, and by extension his supporters.
We’re in a weird moment in the world in which we are more fully aware of the kinds of massive government wills to power against oppressed peoples like the Palestinians, against the immigrant and refugees crossing the southern US border, against Ukraine and Crimea, and soon against the Kurds in southern Syria. It’s weird and painful to be fully aware of these events, be only kind of able to process and discuss them as they’re happening, and feel truly helpless to do much about them. I feel this way, and I have to imagine a poet born in the American Midwest in her 60s watching a young journalist try to fight for her life in her homeland probably feels this way too.
(photo: https://www.amazon.com/Tiny-Journalist-American-Poets-Continuum/dp/1942683731/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=tiny+poems&qid=1570366302&sr=8-2)