"They are filled, the tombs" Michal Rubin writes, as she chronicles her grief and rage during the first year of the current Gaza war. These poems are a eulogy for a dismantled fantasy, a foundation Rubin grew up with in Israel. She exposes her helplessness with an intense directness that challenges her own privileged safety, while carrying on a tender poetic dialogue with Palestinian writings.
The poems move between days of despair and days of yearning for another world. There are hard pictures of battlefields: "the beetle's legs were gripping/ the wrinkled uniform of the dead", and the dream-like descriptions of another world where connection and understanding is possible "...we touched with our fingers the grooves on our foreheads, measured the depth of the story that created the craters on our faces/ We mapped each other's tales on our bodies...".