These poems are about you: / you who survived,” writes Dalia Taha in her collection Enter World (Graywolf Press, November 2026), translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel. “About the poetry inside you, / the books, the displaced villages, / the sun, the libraries, the grass, / the love poems, the settlement’s night lights, the trees...” Taha’s clear and unsparing collection is indeed filled with all of these things, which depict life in Palestine and “humans at their most brutal, / and their most tender.” While the poems portray the landscape and trappings of life under occupation and violence, Taha’s work does not foreground the “visible manifestations of war,” as Elkamel says, but “its indiscernible casualties—what happens to the interior.” In potent lyrical poems, Taha traces how the self can become estranged from land and nature as well as how one becomes attuned to silences, both personal and historical.
Sara Elkamel translated Dalia Taha’s poems from the Arabic in the collection Enter World (Graywolf Press, November 2026). (Credit: Sima Diab)
Elkamel recalls, while she was translating the collection, talking with Taha about poetry as “an antidote to—or a home for—silence and all the possibilities we unearth if we open ourselves to communicating with nature.” So when Elkamel noticed Modern Poetry in Translation post a call for submissions for an issue guest edited by Jessica Sequeira titled “Rhythms of the Land: Focus on the Poetry of Nature,” she immediately thought of Taha’s poems. The magazine went on to publish two pieces from Enter World alongside translations of poems by Kenzaburō Ōe and Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Akagi Kobayashi and Stephen Capus, respectively. The print triannual was established in 1965 by poets Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, who hoped to “get poetry out from behind the Iron Curtain into a wider circulation in English.” Hughes described the magazine as an “airport” for translations by young poets, and for over sixty years it has featured poetry from all over the world, with themed issues and volumes dedicated to particular languages and regions. Submissions will open for a few weeks in November or December.
Taha, who lives in the West Bank, released her original book in Arabic in 2025 and told Elkamel as they were working together, “Writing this book was an attempt at writing against genocide; against genocide mutilating our relationship with the world.” During that time, Elkamel found a home for Taha’s poems that shared that commitment: Mizna Online, the digital platform of Mizna, a nonprofit devoted to Arab and SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) literature, film, and art. In addition to Mizna Online, Mizna publishes a biannual print journal of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art and produces events, including the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival. Elkamel praises “the clarity with which [Mizna] understands cultural work as inseparable from questions of justice and decolonization.” Submissions in all genres to Mizna are open.
Another outlet that curates Arabic literature and one dear to Elkamel’s heart is Arab Lit, which spotlighted her translations of Taha’s work in both its print annual, ArabLit Quarterly, and on its online platform. “[It] feels less like a literary publication than a living archive and community around Arabic literature and its movement into English and other languages,” says Elkamel. The platform showcases poetry, fiction, and nonfiction translated from Arabic, as well as interviews and criticism about translated Arabic literature; recent print issues focused on grief and Syrian writing. Submissions in all genres are currently open.
While working on the manuscript, Elkamel got some momentum and encouragement from winning the translation contest run by Columbia Journal, judged by Stine An, for the poems “Enter City’s Inhabitants” and “Enter Olive Trees.” An noted that “in these translations, each vowel lives on the page—breathing, watching, sensing.” The journal, edited by graduate students in Columbia University’s MFA writing program, gathers poetry, fiction, and nonfiction online as well as in a print annual. The editors administer a contest for its online platform and one for its print issue every year; Elkamel praises them for helping “celebrate the vital, often underacknowledged work of literary translation” through the contest. Submissions are currently closed.
During the period when Enter World was out on submission and Elkamel had that “uncomfortable waiting-room sensation,” the Yale Review published two translations from the book. “It was a good luck charm,” says Elkamel. “The same week the poems came out, we received the offer from Graywolf.” The print quarterly, which was started in 1819 as the Christian Spectator, is “a site where readers can discover new literature by the best writers of our era alongside engaged, passionate criticism that is beautifully written and powerfully thought,” write the editors. A recent issue, for example, placed fiction by Nell Freudenberger alongside poetry by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, nonfiction by Namwali Serpell, and a folio of work themed on AI and the future of writing, including contributions from Sheila Heti and Lauren Oyler. Submissions are currently closed.
Dana Isokawa is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
