In 1971, in the wake of George Jackson’s killing by San Quentin prison guards, a poem entitled ‘Enemy of the Sun’ was found among ninety-nine books in the revolutionary’s cell. The handwritten poem came to be circulated in Black Panther newspapers under Jackson’s name, assumed to be a vestige of his more than a decade long incarceration. But Jackson never wrote the poem; it was authored by the Palestinian poet Sameeh Al-Qassem and had been included in an anthology of the same title a year before Jackson’s death. This collection links twelve poets working in a poetics of refusal and of hope. Bearing witness to decades of Zionist occupation, to a diaspora exiled in refugee camps and writers held captive in Israeli jails, it offers a means to an end: ‘as poetry, yes it sings – as bullets on a mission; it calls for change’.
