Outside the Joy

Preview 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.” 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.  “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