Theories of Return | Sara Abou Rashed
Diode Editions | Paperback | 3.1.26
Theories of Return is an urgent and unflinching poetry collection that resists both literal and literary erasure, asserting the right to exist. In these pages, Sara Abou Rashed’s voice does not ask permission but commands attention, bearing witness to exile while refusing silence. As much as the book honors her family’s displacement from Palestine to Syrian refugee camps and later to the U.S., it is ultimately collective rather than confessional, pressing outward to ask universal questions about the ethics of war, ownership, language, motherhood, and intimacy. Each poem operates as its own theory and attempt at return, binding abstraction to lived experience, and inherited history to the brutal clarity of the present moment. Formally daring and emotionally exacting, Theories of Return offers readers poetry that is intellectually rigorous, deeply human, and unafraid to speak.
Theories of Return is a searing and intimate poetry collection that reckons with exile, inheritance, and the impossible mathematics of going back. Moving between Gaza, Syria, Palestine, and the diasporic present, Sara Abou Rashed braids lyric intensity with political clarity, refusing abstraction in favor of lived consequence, bodies, borders, language, and grief that multiplies across generations. These poems examine what return means when home is inaccessible and memory is fragmented. Identity is forged under occupation and displacement, yet also insists on tenderness, dark humor, and fierce intelligence as modes of survival. At once formally inventive and emotionally direct, Theories of Return speaks to readers drawn to poetry that confronts history without sacrificing intimacy and that understands language itself as a site of resistance, mourning, and fragile hope.
"Theories of Return is vital not only due to the beauty of its language—the richness of image and metaphor, and not only for its magic with form and shape, but also, vitally, for how it complicates place, home, land, and movement. It charges a reader with the question: what have you taken for granted?"
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
