*Ticket (£6) includes refreshments & 10% off the author's book. 20 capacity, seated & accessible. Some tickets are allocated as PWYC starting at £0.00: please select this option if you need to do so*

EBB is thrilled to host a double-bill evening with Lebanese-Palestinan poet Hasib Hourani launching his first collection of poems, *rock flight*, published in the UK by Prototype, and a reading by Palestinian/Jordanian poet Mira Mattar.

*rock flight* is a book-length poem that 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.

"*rock flight* is relentlessly potent. Merging resistance and poetry, Hasib Hourani writes back—against the “suffocating state” and imperial forces. Be ready to be transformed by Hourani’s diasporic anticolonial poetics."
– Don Mee Choi

"Poetry’s most captivating speech is the apparatus of colonial and administrative language wickedly turned back on itself. This poetry is wicked: a rock, flung whilst studied, signalling hard, unerring and remarkable."
– Holly Pester

"*rock flight* registers catastrophic silences, deletions, choked speech, at the same time as it builds a language capable of resistance. Hourani is a brilliant poet, generous with his own story, scrupulous with facts, incisive and ambidextrous with poetic technique. His impossible multiple choice questions, dazing asides, involving passages of narrative train the eye on constriction, violence, and freedom: the box, the rock, the bird soaring with a spear through its neck.’
– Caleb Klaces

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker, and educator currently living on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Born stateless in Bahrain, Hasib grew up between the Kulin Nation and the Gulf, returning to so-called Australia in 2016. His practice disrupts expectations of place, archive, and the relationship between the two. Through writing, he enacts processes of sprawling, fragmenting, and stitching back together. Hasib 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 is published in their 2022 anthology, *Against Disappearance*.

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. Her novella, Yes, I Am A Destroyer, was published in 2020. Her chapbook, Affiliation, and her first collection, The Bow were both published in 2021. A new chapbook, And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring, has recently been published by Veer2. Her work has been published in Granta, The Chicago Review, Berfrois and elsewhere. She regularly reads her work in the UK and abroad. Mira lives and works in London.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less