“Awad’s deeply felt sophomore collection (after Set to Music a Wildfire) reverberates with lines as hard and true as rock: “The lie is that I survived because parts of me didn’t.” She shifts and complicates the sentiment, adding, “we tell the version of the story/ that lets us live with ourselves.” Divided into three parts, the collection opens with a section titled “The Whole Red World” that centers on her mother, a painter: “I want to fill my pockets/ with the color my mother made, to break the red/ mountain and eat its red pulp, to pin its red wings/ to my back and walk the red desert of my heart/ that learned from my mother how to live.” One of the most heartrending entries abandons punctuation and flows out in a long, breathless column, recalling her grandmother’s death: “my father watched his brother carry/ your body from his phone’s small/ screen that’s what happens when/ you die in a pandemic.” These poems mourn with ferocity and clarity, animals and objects rearing up like a “weep of wolves,/ a drought of bullets, the claws of a catalpa, a mother’s unworry,/ a wilderness of blood.” It is the hurt—and Awad’s bravery in facing it—that lends these poems their remarkable power and vividness.” —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

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.”

Praise for Outside the Joy

  • “Part ode, part elegy, part protection spell, Ruth Awad’s Outside the Joy holds at its radiant heart precarity itself. These poems inventory the losses, the mercies, and the small miracles in this life that is not ours for long: Here is the moon as freckled as a mother’s skin, and here is the “sunlight that arrives//  first at your window, quietly pawing/ even when you can’t stand it.” Outside the Joy is an unforgettable book by one of our best contemporary poets. What a gift to be haunted by these words.”

    —Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

  • “There is a beautiful use of sensual language in Outside the Joy, and there is wisdom. I loved it so much. ‘Is it true the dead are so modest / they require a shroud I’m dying / to know if privacy is even a thing when you’re everywhere.’ Yes. Indeed. What a terrific, memorable voice. These poems are not just well made, they are one of a kind.”

    —Ilya Kaminsky, author of New York Times notable book Deaf Republic

  • “Just a few stanzas into Outside the joy, you find yourself leaning toward the page, breathing just a little slower than before as you inhale Ruth Awad’s music. This is a book you hold on to for dear life. Thankfully, each of these poems is here to hold you in return.”

    —Saeed Jones, award-winning author of Alive at the End of the World

In Lebanon during the civil war, a teenage boy and his family witness leveled cities, displaced civilians, the aftermath of massacres. Resources are scarce and uncertainty is everywhere. What does it mean to survive? To leave behind a home torn apart by war? To carry the burden of what you've seen across an ocean? These poems follow a man in search of security as he leaves his country for America, falls in love, and becomes a single father to three daughters. Through the perspective of one man, his family, and even his country, Set to Music a Wildfire explores the violence of living, the guilt of surviving, the loneliness of faith, and the impossible task of belonging.

Winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press. Cover art by Daniel Obzejta. 

Praise for Set to Music a Wildfire

  • "In her lovely debut, Set to Music a Wildfire, Ruth Awad rebuilds the image of a broken country and sutures the memory of a shattered family with words that can’t stop singing. A powerful homage to her father, who survived the Lebanese Civil War and emigrated to the United States and married her mother, these poems tell the story of the exile and all he left behind. 'I carry these suitcases full of rain,' she writes, in her father’s voice, 'because I can’t take my country.' These poems are alive as the keen-song of the griever and the clear-eyed and patient gaze of the children of the children of war. She writes: 'When someone dies in Tripoli, we write their name on paper / next to their pictures and post them where others can see. / Walk the street where the names wave from the walls, / flutter from windows, buildings gilled with sheets. / breathing paper, beating paper, the streets are paper.' In Awad’s paper streets, we can see the names and breathe." —Philip Metres

    —Philip Metres

  • "The story Ruth Awad tells in this gorgeous debut collection is one of history and memory, displacement and estrangement, and perhaps above all, imagination and empathy. It’s the story not only of the Lebanese Civil War—the sky 'unzipping,' the 'whistling bombs you couldn’t see coming…the beehive rounds, whirring metal wings,' the 'woman with half-singed hair…her breath like a sizzled wick'—but also of a family in America and the struggles that continued here. Awad approaches the story—of a country, a man, a family—as if excavating priceless artifacts and holding them up to the light. You will want to lean in close to see them, in all their rich, chilling, and tender detail."

    —Maggie Smith

  • "These poems and the people who inhabit them, 'born from the mouth of a bullet hole,' carry a darkness impossible to outrun, the darkness of war, specifically the Lebanese Civil War of the 70s and 80s. For Ruth Awad, the inheritance of such grief remains immeasurable as it fuels 'our bodies, // their infinite capacity for ruin.' Both immigration narrative and meditative lyric on identity politics—'When will you learn my name?'—Set to Music a Wildfire is disturbingly memorable in its intimate and articulate confrontations."

    —Michael Waters

  • "Ruth Awad writes in a hard, classical style. Whether she is writing about her father's violent childhood in Lebanon or his American wife and their thee daughters, she is naturally dark. I admire her honesty and emotionalism as she transforms, with language, chaos into art."

    —Henri Cole

  • "But it is precisely this ability, Awad’s comfort working within liminal fields and figures, that underscores the collection’s virtue. Rather than reiterate Hannah Arendt’s now-ubiquitous phrase (“the banality of evil”), the collection underscores the banality of living with evil, of living through evil, even after evil itself has become unrecognizable, if ever it was: how to weigh suffering alongside suffering? Is quotidian desire any less potent than its absolutist corollary? Life’s minutia doesn’t disappear when the shells first fall, so where does one place pleasure amongst the war-scape?"

    —J.P. Grasser, Kenyon Review

  • "Set to Music a Wild Fire is a story that needs to be told, especially today, now, reminding us of those lines from “Asphodel” by William Carlos Williams: “it is difficult to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Awad’s poems give us real news of human beings behind the current wall of political wrangling, and behind the question of who belongs and who doesn’t."

    —Amy Small-McKinney, Connotation Press 

Additional Praise

“At its best, Ruth Awad’s Set to Music a Wildfire further convinces me poetry, among many things, is a living testament to both art’s unique ability to arise—and our need for art to arise—from suffering and tragedy."—Mike Good, Tupelo Quarterly

"Set to Music a Wildfire shows what it is to survive, to be as whole as possible, to claim a solid self."—Tyler Robert Sheldon, The Los Angeles Review

"Set to Music a Wildfire details Awad’s father’s journey to America in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War, his tempestuous marriage to and divorce from Awad’s mother, and the heartbreak this separation inflicts on the family. However, though this collection is a testament to a father, and at times a dedicated investigational report of a war-torn country, Set to Music a Wildfire is also a powerful work of self recovery. Awad’s speaker traces her lineage, the circumstances that made her existence possible, as gently as a finger gliding along the spine of a slumbering body. " —Enikő Vághy

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