Outside the Joy
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
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 & Poetrya 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.
