VPLAs People’s Choice AwardVote Now

VPLAs People’s Choice AwardVote Now

rock flight

Title: rock flight
Author: Hasib Hourani
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

Shortlist: Poetry

rock flight is a book-length poem that, over seven chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.

Judges’ report

Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is a thrilling and original work, featuring a sophisticated exploration of the possibilities of language to deconstruct and reconstruct, to destroy and create. Drawing on diverse influences, Hourani renders not only the devastation of Israeli occupation on Palestinian people wherever they are now, but creates a new vocabulary for contemplating the past, and forging pathways of resistance into the future. rock flight is attentive to form and underpinned by lyric virtuosity that activates the reader to see and consider space and time in different ways. It shifts elegantly between intimacy and reportage, political analysis and the soft fragmentation of everyday life. This is a book that changes the poetic landscape and makes ground for genuine revolution.

Extract

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About the Author

Photo by Leah Jing McIntosh

Hasib Hourani

VPLA book photography by Sarah Walker

The 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards are proudly supported by the Victorian Government through the Community Support Fund and Creative Victoria.