Blue-Black Liver

Blue-Black Liver takes the form of a mock newspaper, its ragged poetry columns and shifting type scales mirroring the fractured flow of water, history, and memory. By adopting the familiar grammar of the newspaper, it exposes the form’s limitations—revealing instead submerged currents of colonial and ecological violence. In the opening spread I splice A.B. Yehoshua’s “Facing the Forests” into a settler-colonial greenwashing “forest of solitudes,” only to watch it ignite in an act of resistance. From these foundational reworkings the paper pours into fevered reflections— “Drought I” and “Drought II” pulse with arid heat, “Deluge” surges in elemental grief—before “Gaslit Histories / Rewriting Wounds” excavates lived and colonial violence. Lyrical interludes in “Soft,” “Ode to the Rose,” and “Everything and Nothing” meditate on embodied rupture and memory; “Future Biology / Beyond Womb” reimagines anatomy as agency; the recipe in “St. John’s Wort” roots us in herbal alchemy; “Conjunctions” probes the words that bind and fracture; “You Can’t Get Blood from a Stone” upends mythic prophecy; and “A Practical Guide to Caring for Your Dust” closes with mordant wit and a reminder that even the lightest detritus carries heavy testimony. Black-and-white archival photographs of the Jordan River (c. 1900–1920)—sourced from the American Colony Photo Department and the Palestine Museum Digital Archives—punctuate every spread, reclaiming landscapes erased by the colonial narrative.