Coming Soon

Founded in 2005, Cypher Books, a New York City-based, independent publisher is proud to present breaking poems, the new collection of poetry from Tony award-winning poet, Suheir Hammad.  Consistent with Cypher's mission to publish innovative and necessary poetry, Hammad departs from her previous books with a bold and explosive style to do what the best poets have always done: create a new language.  Using "break" as a trigger for every poem, Hammad destructs, constructs, and reconstructs the English language for us to hear the sound of a breath, a woman's body, a land, a culture, falling apart, broken, and put back together again.   Download breaking poems launch announcement >                                                  

Advance Praise

"Incantatory and powerful, Suheir Hammad's voice compels you in these new poems to enact a beautiful revolution, a retrieval from the very heart of loss. Everything falls on the off beat, wa love, wa body, wa life, wa freedom."
— Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and Song for Night.

 

"Suheir Hammad's break introduces English to an Arabic vernacular that startles into being an altogether new language, bridging the archipelago of a Palestine under siege to the diaspora and beyond, breaking through convention, breaking open locks on mind and heart, breaking into a music inspired by the Coltranes, Sun Ra and free jazz, Lee Scratch Perry and Ravi Shankar, a music that is at once a joyous celebration of survival and a poignant cri de Coeur that cannot be ignored and that Mahmoud Darwish should have lived to see.  This is a poetry written for people who have endured the winds of hurricanes and invasions.  What wisdom, energy, joy and poignancy Hammad brings to the page-for all of this, and for teaching me a new speaking, I give her my thanks."
— Carolyn Forché

 

"breaking poems takes on the geographic lines that have bound women for ages and marked their bodies, their selves with the lines of unjust notions of property and exploitation. These are poems that inform the dreams of a world that honors woman and honors woman speaking her own voice, breaking the bonds of old worlds with bright moments, bright moments, bright moments."
— Afaa Michael Weaver