Five in the evening

   Eleven at night

   The hour of death

   The hour of the despot

   The hour of nightmare

   Eight in the morning

These poems are taken from Ibrahim Nasrallah's Rain Inside: Selected Poems (forthcoming from Curbstone Press, Summer 2009), translated from the Arabic by Omnia Amin and Rick London.

The Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah was born in 1954 in the Alwehdat refugee camp in Jordan, where the families of his parents had taken refuge in 1948, and where he lived until the age of thirty three. He is the author of fourteen books of poems and is also widely known as a novelist and photographer. He currently lives in Amman.

Omnia Amin was born in Cairo, Egypt. She earned her doctorate in Modern English Literature and Feminist Theory at the University of London and is an Associate Professor at the College of Arts & Sciences at Zayed University in Dubai.

Rick London’s most recent publication is the poetry collection The Materialist (Doorjamb Press, 2008). He lives and works in San Francisco.

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