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