Outside the Joy - by Ruth Awad (Paperback)

About the Book

Poems that sear with lyric clarity about grief, love, survival, and wonder amid personal loss and environmental collapse.

Book Synopsis

Outside the Joy is filled with poems that sear with lyric clarity about grief, love, survival, and wonder amid personal loss and environmental collapse.

Tracing losses both interpersonal and universal - from a mother's failing heart to environmental and economic decline ravaging ancestral homelands - OUTSIDE THE JOY is a compendium of abundance in a world rife with want. With a voice as singular as it is illuminating, Awad explores the sharp contrasts of our shared existence: the human capacity to hurt and to hold one another, the love and grief that grow from our ephemeral connectedness. These poems unearth the sacred in the ordinary and invite you to do the same - "if only / you'll let the world / soften you with its touching."

"What a gift to be haunted by these words." --Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Review Quotes

"Just a few stanzas into Outside the Joy, you find yourself leaning toward the page, breathing just a little slower than before as you inhale Ruth Awad's music. This is a book you hold on to for dear life. Thankfully, each of these poems is here to hold you in return." --Saeed Jones, author of Alive at the End of the World
"Part ode, part elegy, part protection spell, Ruth Awad's Outside the Joy holds at its radiant heart precarity itself. These poems inventory the losses, the mercies, and the small miracles in this life that is not ours for long. An unforgettable book by one of our best contemporary poets. What a gift to be haunted by these words." --Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
"There is a beautiful use of sensual language in Outside the Joy, and there is wisdom. What a terrific, memorable voice. These poems are not just well made--they are one of a kind." --Ilya Kaminsky, author Deaf Republic

"In addition to macro themes, Awad exerts a lot of micro pressure on language to extract multiple meanings: Imaginary, the value of the pound' with the quite disparate associations, 'pound' as currency and 'pound' as heart or fist... The common connotations of words are interrogated and seen anew. Look at how the word'abundance' is used: 'America and its incongruent abundance: fields of corn and the hungry in the streets.' Awad's creative pressure on language makes us look at the world's injustices in terms of the haves and have nots and how the language we have to use is both guilty and impotent to rectify the inequality." --Sally Bliumis, author of Echolocation.

About the Author

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese American poet, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, and the author of Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Widely anthologized, her poems most recently appear in You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón and published in association with the Library of Congress. Her work appears in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.