Review: "70,000" by Lenna Jawdat

70,000 by Lenna Jawdat
Published July 2026 via Central Avenue Poetry
★★★★★

In 1948, alongside the other events that comprised the formation of the Israeli state, some 70,000 books were removed from Palestinian homes and libraries. Some 6,000 are now in Israeli libraries, where most Palestinians cannot access them; the remaining 64,000 have presumably been lost to history. Jawdat, herself a poet of Palestinian descent, set out to illustrate this loss in the simplest of ways: by writing out the numbers 1 to 70,000.

The numbers start out simply—columns on a page. The columns tighten as Jawdat seeks to fit more numbers on each page, pens change, the columns expand and contract and fit themselves into and around art, interspersed with history (family history, Palestinian history) in the form of poetry.

I ask my partner to help me write numbers, notes Jawdat. He wrote less than 20 before tiring. (168*)

This is an inherently political book—there is no way for it not to be—and it is sharp and pointed and painful. Palestine is for Jawdat an abstraction to a point, a place her forebears fled and a place she does not know if she will ever be allowed to visit. And it is also, to her, an intensely real place, one tied up in family and scent and memory and war. And still a place she does not know if she will ever be allowed to visit.

What I like in poetry is sometimes idiosyncratic, but I like poetry that asks me to work for it, that asks me to think, that do something interesting with form. And this delivers in spades. My favorite poetry collection that I've read in a good long time.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.