summer farah

@summ.bsky.social

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author of I COULD DIE TODAY & LIVE AGAIN (Game Over Books) + THE HUNGERING YEARS (Host Publications) 💜| 🇵🇸 summerfarah.com

Each encounter with the playful—the pussy problems and Carly Rae Jepsen and Mitski—gives way to the existential. What does it mean to live within the wound of an “almost?” What is our responsibility to witness and what wounds heal when we are offered witness in return? Farah sometimes wants answers and sometimes doesn’t. This in itself lends to a dream-like state of possibility. After talking with Farah, I went down a protracted rabbit hole investigating fandom. Not so much because it’s crucial to consider when considering The Hungering Years, but because I found I hadn’t been an abiding fandom-fan in years and I was trying to figure out why. What I can say now is that to ask questions of fandom is really to ask questions of devotion in a world where apathy feels increasingly accessible, inevitable, and even self-protecting. In The Hungering Years, fandom feels like an expression of care, and dare I say an extension of humanness? At least insomuch that we all desire connection. And isn’t this what fandom is about? Beyond the fact that Farah’s fan-based poems are cool, they’re also evidence of yearning, of the desire to be among. To not write “of,” something but “to,” and maybe even “with.” Just as I found restoration at my BFPW, Farah explores the revelatory possibility of communing with those she has adored.
Something I’m really hoping I follow through with on The Hungering Years tour is to reach out to Mask Blocs and clean air clubs in whatever cities I visit and invite representatives to come to whatever bookstore or space that I’m at to talk about the work that they do in mitigating spread of virus, and cleaning our air, and taking care of people, and keeping people safe. So that’s, you know, it’s just an opportunity, when I have an object and people are inviting me into spaces because of that object. What kind of world can I build within that room? People are coming to see me, theoretically, and what can I ask of them in return, outside of buying the book?
A podium with I COULD DIE TODAY AND LIVE AGAIN, THE HUNGERING YEARS, AND ARAB APOCALYPSE on it
Adnan is not the only figure who plays a major role in Farah’s book and her poetics. “I have loved so many prophetic women,” Farah writes, and these women can be found in every corner of the landscape that Farah creates through her poems: Mary Oliver, Mitski, Carly Rae Jepsen, Olivia Rodrigo, her beloved friends. In Farah’s poetic world, a prophetic woman is one who expands, through their art or their living, what is possible, one who “dream[s] any tomorrow that could mundanely be.” In “(DEAR ETEL ADNAN) I DON’T THINK OF CARLY RAE JEPSEN,” Farah describes listening to Jepsen’s music while reading Adnan’s work, writing, “The beauty of this experiment is that I will connect even the furthest of dots.” Farah does not attempt to justify these connections to skeptical readers who might be eager to discount the merit or seriousness of her subjects; she places those she loves together in conversation freely and with delight. The earnestness of Farah’s devotion is admirable and even enviable in a cultural moment so steeped in cynicism and fearful of cringe. Farah loves what she loves wholeheartedly, in a way that inspires me to be more unabashed about my own obsessions. Her poems remind us that devotion, like hope (to adapt the words of Mariame Kaba), is a discipline: an essential practice against apathy and nihilism. “What can you do for the art you love in return? How can I honor you? How can I honor you?” asks Farah of Adnan, her adoration of Adnan urging her to better herself, to live more closely in alignment with the politics and poetics that Adnan espouses.
Today, Mizna celebrates the release of beloved contributor Summer Farah’s debut poetry collection, The Hungering Years, out now with Host Publications. Just as with her recent chapbook i could die today and live again, Farah’s debut weaves intertextually across genres and media, mixing figures such as Etel Adnan and Mitski in this excerpt and throughout the book. Here, as habibetna Jess Rizkallah’s blurb says, “This book a mycelium network of memories that aren’t static, unless it’s the static you reach your hands through before falling into the tv screen. Everything is connected, everything is romantic, everything is cinema. This collection changes what / how I consider. It is unafraid of hysteria.” Given Farah’s years of loving labor to our community, reviewing SWANA books, starting pathbreaking critical poetics columns, and contributing in in/visible ways to Palestinian movement work, it makes sense that her debut is generous in its ability to bring us into the wide, capacious world of her reading, and furthermore, inspire more radical, relational modes of literacy therein. Just as Etel Adnan is a north star for many of us, Summer Farah is someone to whom I’ve turned in my most difficult times, as editor, reader, poet, critic, organizer, lover of all things Zelda, and above all, friend. We hope that everyone will join us in generously, loudly uplifting this luminary debut of one of the most important rising poets alive today. —George Abraham, Editor-at-Large
AFTER MOUNT TAMALPAIS, I TELL ETEL ADNAN ABOUT SUPERNATURAL I make paintings and watercolors of Tamalpais. Again and again. Why do I insist? Am I trying to hold some image, to capture some meaning, to assert its presence, to measure myself to its timelessness, to fight, or to accept? —Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais I understand, I tell her, the desire to not only return but to be consumed. I have had obsessions, I have been made small by those obsessions, I wonder if you would agree it is possible for something to be absolute but still unseen. I was Cassandra, once. I wanted dearly to go to the mountain. Instead of cliches, I design my pulse to loneliness anew. It’s different than ten years ago—I go outside, now, take its contradiction with me. Oh the most painful love-story of them all! These gaps between comprehension! I could never forget, no matter how many times they beg me to. The mountain was there before us and it will be there after. Yes, a return; each journey wrought another history, each day I try to capture its form; why do I insist? In lieu of a paintbrush, I sew my voice in its throat. In the Beginning, there was Blood, Horror, Myth, Obsession; and then there was Love, there was, I swear, when the static spilled! again and again, our eyes stained with its evidence, We find new proof uncovered on every return. We were all Cassandra, once, young and hysterical, oh, I hope you’ll understand I take it so seriously when I say the violence shifted subjects. Oh, we screamed! we screamed! We swore our eyes were true! Audience becomes the blood, the horror, the myth, the static, Again, and again, you said, again, and again, I say, again, again.
Summer giggling while Supernatural 15.18 plays on a screen behind her
The Hungering Years Cover alongside text: The Hungering Years by Summer Farah (Host, Feb.) has an electric pulse both steady and sudden, dense like the tightness of the back and jaw and vivid like their impossible release. This debut full-length collection accepts and measures the price of self-knowledge, stories, and laughter, to be inside of thoughts or water or horizon: museums are marked by steals and body counts, the names of things declare their control. Colonial tolls reorient the costs of borders and Zionism when the speaker, so in love with much read, heard, said, softly asks: “I wonder about the life stolen from me. Would I love what I love if I loved it from Palestine?” For Farah, to remember before is to remember the land itself, time and space wed in alive, exquisite poems.
I TELL ETEL ADNAN ABOUT MITSKI Your name in everyone's mouth / the everyone in question are those who look at me & when I look back, yes! / there is recognition! How many do you know you've made feel this way? You change me: the way I consider the fog, my attention to eath, a desire for the surreal right where I stand. I have loved so many prophetic women. At night, we dream any tomorrow that could mundanely be. Do you trust anxious intuition? That looks to the future with a nervous throat? Sometimes, what looks back is as affirming as it is warning: you know what this path can bring. And so I listen to her sing: I am fulfilled by the knowing / another recognition. She changes me: the way I consider pretty, my attention to sunlight & how it hits the trees, a desire for what you create to not consume you, a desire to create through the consumption, a desire to live past the consumption, a desire for death, a desire for desire, a desire, a desire, a desire,
Seeking something for that language to push against, perhaps, Farah finds the prose poem: the perfect vehicle with which to explore constraint, the page pressing inward on all sides. Inside the prose poem, maximalism verges into excess, attention into obsession. Sentences arranged side by side place everything on the same plane of importance — fig trees, friendship, chronic illness, bed sheets, the supernatural, the show Supernatural. In “BLAME IT ON THE MOON, BABY,” the placement of a period punctuates the rhythm of a preoccupied mind: “I am always doing something wrong … If I leave my room I’ll die. If I touch the water I’ll die. If I tell a doctor I’ll die. I’d like to blame the moon. I track my symptoms with its cycle.” Repetition seems inevitable here, our path through the poem prescribed by the speaker’s ruminations. But at some point, the repetition ruptures. Hypothetical constructions give way, once again, to declaratives — “I love excuses”, “I look to the sky” — dragging us back from the anxious future into the present. ‍ Abourahme writes that “The most primary organising logic in colonial order is separation. This separation is not simply physical or spatial. It is ontological and psycho-affective. It is a separation between subject and object, between the living body and the ‘body-things’ around it. Colonialism, then, takes the entangled intimacies, the dependencies on native bodies, labour, land, energies and presences, and transforms them into separations and a refusal of mutuality or any kind of commonness.” Farah’s prose poems oppose this logic, digging deep into the interiority of a body, a landscape, even a symbol as overburdened with meaning as the moon. These poems generate insight not by association, but by arrangement. They are framed by relation; that is, by surfaces in contact. They are interested in touch as reciprocal, rather than intrusive. “I will admit, I am using you, Etel,” says the speaker in “I TELL ETEL ADNAN ABOUT JULIA & JULIA.”…
The Angels are Falling
A blurry photo of summer holding the hungering years
The same screenshot of Dean and Castiel sitting in a car from 5.14 of Supernatural repeated. The top text says "where is your hunger, dean?" The bottom text reads "Where is your copy of The Hungering Years, Dean?" with the new words and letters crudely added in pink.
The cycles of video game play and resistance/revolution structure Summer Farah’s chapbook I Could Die Today and Live Again, built around the characters and conceits of Legend of Zelda. These poems leverage some of the key motifs of recent and classic Zelda games — battles fought over generations, lost champions, lost land, the reset of “blood moons” — to talk about Palestinian identity and resistance against empire and annihilation. Farah’s poems defy conventional use of the page space, with words turning sideways, crowding in a multigenerational cacaphony, or forming the Triforce symbol. The familiar NPC refrain “Do you need me to repeat that?” recurs through the book with the power to make you laugh, then gasp, then cry. Do yourself a favor and read up now — Farah’s first full length collection is forthcoming in 2026.
AT THE MET CLOISTERS I count what does not belong. In the rare treasures room, heads shuffle closer from across display glass. People fall in love around stolen objects. I long to drink out of the cup from “Somewhere in the Near East.” The label reads crusaders & merchants alike loved to carry fragile objects from the Holy Land, even at risk of breaking. Encased in glass, we are remembered for when they were fragile. There is only one object labeled “Somewhere in the Near East” in the rare treasures room. How often were they careful with our bodies.
After Mount Tamalpais, I Tell Etel Adnan About Supernatural - Summer Farah "I make paintings and watercolors of Tamalpais. Again and again. Why do I insist? Am I trying to hold some image, to capture some meaning, to assert its presence, to measure myself to its timelessness, to fight, or to accept? —Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais" I understand, I tell her, the desire to not only return but to be consumed. I have had obsessions, I have been made small by those obsessions, I wonder if you would agree it is possible for something to be absolute but still unseen. I was Cassandra, once. I wanted dearly to go to the mountain. Instead of cliches, I design my pulse to loneliness anew. It’s different than ten years ago—I go outside, now, take its contradiction with me. Oh the most painful love-story of them all! These gaps between comprehension! I could never forget, no matter how many times they beg me to. The mountain was there before us and it will be there after. Yes, a return; each journey wrought another history, each day I try to capture its form; why do I insist? In lieu of a paintbrush, I sew my voice in its throat. In the Beginning, there was Blood, Horror, Myth, Obsession; and then there was Love, there was, I swear, when the static spilled! again and again, our eyes stained with its evidence, We find new proof uncovered on every return. We were all Cassandra, once, young and hysterical, oh, I hope you’ll understand I take it so seriously when I say the violence shifted subjects. Oh, we screamed! we screamed! We swore our eyes were true! Audience becomes the blood, the horror, the myth, the static, Again, and again, you said, again, and again, I say, again, again.
Blood, obviously, has multiple meanings to it, too, right? It means kinship; it can also mean history. When I think about the biblical implication of [blood], after Cain kills his brother, God says, your brother’s blood wails to me from the ground. Blood also means connection, and it means bond, but it is also a language on its own. What does it mean to always be bound to another person? Even families who maybe break contact still carry pieces of each other with them. No matter how much you might be in disharmony with your family, you are still of them, you know? Bloodmercy. In the book, it’s very clear that the sisters have a borderline codependent relationship. When I was thinking about how to differentiate the voices of Cain, Eve, and Abel, I was thinking about the three modes of poetry. Lyrical. Abel is narrative. Eve is dramatic. If we’re writing this same poem from Cain’s perspective, she’s gonna be rapping a little bit. If we’re writing this poem from Abel’s perspective, she has a lot to say, especially because, canonically, Abel does not have a voice in the original fable. I wanted a single word that evoked the suffocating nature of family. My enduring questions to God.
I learn independence through the cost of fruit / a walk in blazing sun / plastic bags full, weighing into the veins of my fingers. This, the first summer away from home. Can you spend 14 years in one place & not leave parts of yourself behind? At the end of my hungering year I broke my fast with figs / olive loaf fresh from farmers market / creme fraiche melting on tongues / legs crossed against kitchen tile, knees brushing knees; what will I sacrifice to remember this? Here, I makeup for all that I have denied myself. There is no balm for restriction greater than a sugar lying quickly to a better judgment. I pretend there is something ancestral in this. Umang says Abundance is raspberries, figs, bed sheets, poetry. Excess is watching them rot. I imagine the figtrees along stone staircases my mother used to scale. I imagine a mediterranean sun sweltering leaves that adorn soft bodies. I imagine a world in which I have no hungering year, a world that does not make me wish to have one. Mama says everything is changing too fast; for weeks we hunger for nothing but shawarma made by someone else. A home disappears around us & I wonder what will happen to the lemon tree by the window. Solmaz Sharif writes A life is a thing you have to start. I hear her / yet I wait, noticing skin in places I wouldn’t have allowed before. Sometimes the hungering year returns, as long as a second / a yearning / a spiral / against a public sidewalk / the molding of figs in my palm / among the grass of my parents’ yard. Can you spend 14 years in one place & not leave parts of yourself behind? Yes. You must not have come with anything to begin with.
Utterly magnetic, Summer Farah’s debut poetry collection The Hungering Years is a rush of breathless song, voicing confessions so often left unsung amidst personal and collective crisis. “I am afraid of asking the right questions,” Farah admits. But through intimate conversations with fellow Arab-American writer and literary ancestor Etel Adnan, this work finds the courage to ask: What is art? An escape? A reflection? Another unhealthy attachment? Though the answers are elusive, what steps into the light is a collective of friends whose genuine care and companionship anchor these poems through their spiraling search. “I am always looking for Palestine, and yes, I am always looking for love,” these poems croon, holding so much of the world even as they trace an inheritance of displacement. The Hungering Years conjures startling landscapes where we may also experience what it is to be consumed by obsession, echoing with songs by Mitski, iconic scenes from Supernatural, and the sound of the Mediterranean Sea. But as Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes in her introduction, Farah’s repetitions “are more than echo. They are a vernacular of this unspeakable era,” anchored in “questions that keep us reaching toward life,” and questions toward each other. Building glass structures from her questions, Farah pushes their architecture almost to breaking. Then breaking, the spirit—luminous, actualized—reveals itself through the cracks. Through the landscapes of California, Palestine, and all of the distances in between, there emerges a new sense of devotion to what is possible which might thrust us, together, “off the edge, / in love, towards God.”
While the creative practices of the “Divine” and “Oracle” sections involved my awareness and intention, the angels came as a surprise! In Deluge, I have a poem called “Angel” that was the first “night poem” I ever wrote, though I didn’t have a name for that process at the time. The poem begins: “After a month of asking, suddenly, a voice.” There’s been this need in me for many years now, as long as I can remember, for something beyond to speak to me, and I am listening for it all the time. I remember feeling very silly as a child, standing next to the ocean waiting for some sign, a single word. To tell me what? I didn’t know. I don’t know. But I knew to hear it would change me. And so I kept returning to the places that felt, to me, sacred—the sea, the night, the page. That desire for a voice to tell me something is at the core of this book. And angels are messengers—that’s the root of the word, in most of the languages that speak of them. My original notions of a voice visiting me came from my faith, in the form of angels. In Islam, angels are a bit more present, more commonplace, than in Christianity; I mean, we believe there are angels assigned to always be with us. And they’re important—it’s one of the six pillars of faith, belief in angels, second only to belief in God! In Islam, angels are not so antiquated. You might encounter one going about your day, and you wouldn’t be considered crazy. I’m sure their presence in the poems comes from these concurrent associations in my subconscious mind: angels as symbols of faith, of writing, of messages, and of madness. Angels are also made of light, and this is a book interested in shadow, and in opposites. They are figures of reason and the mind. They can only ever follow rules.
Angels I didn't expect angels, but they kept coming. A flicker in the street's margin of shadow. A mote of gold particulate pirouetting by the window. I asked them can you tell me--am I good? but they had little authority. Useless, really, angels--all aureate mist and feathers and superegatory patience. But I can't abandon them to terrestrial cruelty. When they arrive, newly individual and foolish, I pour them cool water from a pitcher, I offer blackberries and white cheese. Needless though they are, on bright mornings when they stay sleeping (like children, their faces I decide are mine)--I keep the curtains closed against the obliterated sky.
Title: After Mount Tamalpais, I Tell Etel Adnan About Supernatural Epigraph: I make paintings and watercolors of Tamalpais. Again and again. Why do I insist? Am I trying to hold some image, to capture some meaning, to assert its presence, to measure myself to its timelessness, to fight, or to accept? —Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais Poem: I understand, I tell her, the desire to not only return but to be consumed. I have had obsessions, I have been made small by those obsessions, I wonder if you would agree it is possible for something to be absolute but still unseen. I was Cassandra, once. I wanted dearly to go to the mountain. Instead of cliches, I design my pulse to loneliness anew. It’s different than ten years ago—I go outside, now, take its contradiction with me. Oh the most painful love-story of them all! These gaps between comprehension! I could never forget, no matter how many times they beg me to. The mountain was there before us and it will be there after. Yes, a return; each journey wrought another history, each day I try to capture its form; why do I insist? In lieu of a paintbrush, I sew my voice in its throat. In the Beginning, there was Blood, Horror, Myth, Obsession; and then there was Love, there was, I swear, when the static spilled! again and again, our eyes stained with its evidence, We find new proof uncovered on every return. We were all Cassandra, once, young and hysterical, oh, I hope you’ll understand I take it so seriously when I say the violence shifted subjects. Oh, we screamed! we screamed! We swore our eyes were true! Audience becomes the blood, the horror, the myth, the static, Again, and again, you said, again, and again, I say, again, again.
THE FIGS ARE MOLDING by SUMMER FARAH
STAY DEAD NATALIE SHAPERO
BEAST AT EVERY THRESHOLD NATALIE WEE
Etel Adnan IN/SOMNIA
WILDNESS BEFORE SOMETHING SUBLIME BY LEILA CHATTI
Purchase by lyrae van clief-stefanon
i be, but i ain't by aziza barnes
COLD THIEF PLACE BY ESTHER LIN
LET THE MOON WOBBLE BY ALLY ANG
CONSPIRACY THEORIES by SAMIA SALIBA
Threesome in the Last Totoya Celica & other poems by m. mick powell
PALESTINIAN by Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Huda J. Fakhreddine
I could die today and live again, nothing here is correctly and it is delicious, & I was so young when I behaved 25
THE HUNGERING YEARS by SUMMER FARAH deal announcement
(DEAR ETEL ADNAN) I DON’T THINK OF CARLY RAE JEPSEN when I read your work but I have been listening to her while I turn the pages anyway / The beauty of this experiment is that I will connect even the furthest of dots. What makes you feel fulfilled? Sometimes, I am in love with the almost knowing of poetry. I tell others, don’t worry if you don’t understand; truthfully, I pray for obscurity. In this gap between knowing is anticipation; to live in that gap, oh! This must be exhilaration / to steal a thesis from a terrible man: Carly Rae Jepsen thrives in the precipice—wouldn’t you like to dance in your room to the beat of a poem you’ve nearly figured out? A letter from a crush, almost decoded? This sweet in-between! Until, I send pages of your work. Until, I send snippets of her songs. In these moments, I know most of desire. I wonder when it will be fed. Still / opportunities to touch
I TELL ETEL ADNAN ABOUT MY PUSSY PROBLEMS “Don’t talk to me about my body…My belly, a zoological garden. My eyes, poor lighthouses, and my mind a rocky and barren garden, exactly like this place and the nonexistent house.” —Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country Do you trust modern medicine, Etel? I admit I avoid the doctor because I am afraid of what they'll reveal. For years, I told them my lungs didn't work right: they pointed to my thighs, my stomach, refused anywhere else, taught me disgust until I was an adult who could not breathe. Proof. I bring up the issues: sore jaw, headaches, pain, pain, pain. Stress, I’m told. I spend my days in bed until right before sunset, return as dark touches the horizon. Who will love me in these shortened moments of dusk? A writer sent me a tincture from Lebanon as a thank you. I put three drops in my water each morning to calm incoming hysteria. It worked, when nothing else would. What's more valuable: $45 for international shipping, or my sanity? My mother tells me I should learn the herbs myself, but part of me believes they have to come from the sham. I was happy in Nazareth, a child spoiled with attention. I wish I remembered what Akka tastes like. My American chatter, amusing to everyone, laughter making the sea air richer & richer & richer. Am I naive to believe if only? I pretend California is substitute enough. I want to go to Mount Tam, I want to show you the moon from the intersection halfway down the hill, I want to take you to the desert garden where I skinned my knees after professing my love to the bright blue cactus flower. The moment was not ruined, no—I loved this pain with easy cause. Most problems go away after yansoon & ibuprofen. Still, my blood tests say my body thinks it is under attack. Could be asthma, could be allergies, an itch, a heat, lines cover my stomach like cat scratches, an abundance of soldiers trample a yearning hand / oh let us imagine irritants false enough to lead t…
Call for submissions! cnf video game writing from LGBTQ+ writers of color. Send submissions to summerisfarah@gmail.com, deadline August 15th, 2023. View more info at the link
I met a man a dying man and I said me too. Met a dead man and I said me too. Must be dead cuz the living can't meet the dead and he said me too. Did you know the dead can fall in love he said. Fact. Did you know the dead fall in love better than the living cuz nothing left to lose. The root of all blues. Skeptical still I strode onward in my seven-league boots as in the fairy tale "hop-o-my-thumb" from a hook of German fairy tales given to me when I had chicken pox. Scratching myself bloody, the ogre gored to death by wild beasts. Seven leagues pet stride toward a dead banjo player in a bad mood. Enchanteur. Or zauberhaft in German.