What do you think?
Rate this book
٤٨ كغم / 48kg.
48kg is the debut poetry collection from Batool Abu Akleen, a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. 48kg is a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems, each accounting for a single kilogram.
Translated from the Arabic by the poet,
with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher
Bilingual: English & Arabic
Translated from the Arabic by the poet,
with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher
Bilingual: English & Arabic
- GenresPoetry
135 pages, Paperback
First published June 16, 2025
2 people are currently reading
79 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 19, 2025
I've never read poetry like this in my life. I'm aware that when I say "it's heart-rending" or "it tears me apart" that metaphor is a privilege.
October 10, 2025
A beautifully-written, heartbreaking collection of poems dealing with feelings of connection to loved ones and home while being surrounded by death and suffering. Very moving
November 16, 2025
I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry. I’m just so so sorry.
December 29, 2025
Refaat Alareer’s posthumous If I Must Die (OR Books 2024) contained poems written during the genocide. This book, by the 20 year old, Akleen represents, as far as I understand, the first book of poems translated into English by someone living through Israel’s accelerated genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Read it. Read it. & act. & act. & act. That it exists is itself remarkable—an act of resistance in the face of decades of attempts to destroy Palestinian culture, the attempts to silence the voices of Palestinians in Gaza. (That none of these books have come from major publishers of U.S. poetry is another story…) The 48 poems are multifaceted. They describe the material horrors of bombings and fragmented bodies but resist, also (or reconfigure) the reduction of people to the mere anonymized flesh that is served up to Western audiences, as the speaker recognizes in children their father’s faces; in a stranger’s striped shirt she is reminded of her father; a severed hand calls out to her person and “asks a lost eye to cry for her.” There is a frequent drive to make a shattered world cohere, to recognize a world marked by Israeli violence and to find in it a community, relations. Many poems, short, willfully abrupt, perhaps, are plaintive, anguished. From a twenty year old, they register the loss of and intense desire for a childhood in which this phase of the genocide would be unthinkable; these poems gain a searing edge in light of a series of poems that metaphorize death as a baby the speaker is giving birth to, a suitor she waits for, a man throwing a profane party. It is hard to read this book and not feel shocked again by the total moral collapse of the west, to not feel anger and sorrow and anger again. And to not have to sit with questions about what to do that demand more precise answers.
November 5, 2025
A gut-wrenching collection of poetry that captures the daily horror and misery of surviving the zionist genocide against Palestine.
December 31, 2025
One of the most powerful books of poetry I’ve ever read. Such haunting poems. This book deserves to be better known.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews