BOOK REVIEW:
Alhamdulillah Anway
by Moudi Sbeity
A BOOK REVIEW BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER
Sbeity’s debut collection recollects his origin and juxtaposes it with his reality. This begins with not only his poetic imagery, but also the cover which is a photograph of his grandmother under a loquat tree. The setting of many of these poems is either his village in southern Lebanon, or that liminal space that poetry can create. As of 2016, he and his family have not yet returned “home.” Despite this exile and estrangement, he wakes, “daily in love with and gratitude for [this world’s] immense beauty” (Epigraph).
Sbeity’s first poem in the collection, “How It Might Have Happened” (12) considers the start of our existence:
Perhaps the world did not start
with a big bang
but with a quiver.
He imagines a world that is more gentle and fragile rather than volatile.
Not with a loud echo
but with a stutter.
The poet wonders about the world and our own utterances. Do we merely repeat and reverberate, or could we show kindness to those who have difficulty in self-expression? These are the questions of “possibility” that dare us to continue, to become, and to simply be.
In “Give Us This Day” Sbeity invokes the “Lord’s Prayer” although the faith system he grew up in evolved in vastly different offerings. Rather his belief stems in his reality, of who shows up and when. His objects of belief are the tangible things that create his every day such as warm fresh out of the baker’s oven bread. Family gathered around a table. Hands that hold, fingers that bind, and tongues that gorge upon the ceremony that is a shared meal (14).
“What Remains” recalls the things he and his family have left behind. Olive groves. Blossoms that shrink in frost. Harvests lost. This is a livelihood destroyed, not only there in Lebanon, but here in Sbeity’s chosen home.
Everything will go awry…
we too / narrowly weather a changing climate,
… recovering from any promise of hope.
But in this loss there is a stripping down of the essentials that provide a certain kind of freedom.
A freedom of self, that finally is “in love with what remains” (20).
“A Life’s Worth” is one of Sbeity’s poems of resistance. It cries out for justice. It witnesses what is being done in Palestine. In his verse he speaks of news reports. A child lifted out of a bombed building. The lifeless body is a sacrifice to what “they” said was necessary, to what had to be done in name of “their” justice (35). Can a child’s dead body ever be justified is the question that resounds in the reader’s internal thoughts.
The poet wonders, “What will you say twenty years from now when / they ask you about Palestine?” Will there be answers? Would one say, “never again”? Meanwhile we all – the poet, the reader, and the questioning audience – should self-interrogate. Do we have the capacity to, “look up from your own guilty palms to see the whole world burning”? Do we have the situational awareness to understand our own complicity in our silence and apathy and inaction? How many stolen lives does it take or broken hearts to justify what a single life is worth? (36).
“Water Remembers where it has been” (57) considers humanity’s connection to water, earth, and our place in the natural world. It remarks on human activity and how our daily lives affect the ground upon which we walk:
what the first humans
touched now streams in rivulets down mountain
cheeks, now courses through your bloodstream
We all are interconnected. These songs, “echoed from long ago” now etch, “memories of ancestral sorrow” in our throats. Our relationship with ~ water as life ~ is a river’s plea that seeps into ground, a fresh new hope. Hopefully it becomes a conversation that is acted upon rather than a, “chorus waving to each other from [an] invisible ledge” (57).
As Sbeity nears the end of his collection, “Remembrance” lays out his own ceremonial mantra:
Of the many reasons
to live, this
is what sustains me –knowing that the spirit
never tires
of its own
daily waking (72).
Perhaps this is the poet’s own mindful labyrinth, to remind themselves to keep one foot in front of the other. And, with each step life will not mire in fatigue but will keep on going.
The final poem within the collection is also its title, “Alhamadulillah Anyway” (74). The poet questions, “And what now?” but cannot supply their own answers.
I cannot speak for you, whoever you imagine yourself / to be.
Instead they realize, “Ahead is a path built not of promise.” The future is unknowable, only that the fact is, “The world is remade again” and again and again.
For Sbeity, the truth reveals in what saved him: Poetry, Awe, and Sunrise (74).
By stating this sacred trinity he lifts his praise, Alhamdulillah anyway.
Moudi Sbeity is published in a variety of journals. He lives in Colorado and writes his way into the world.
Alhamdulillah Anyway
BY MOUDI SBEITY
Available Through Fernwood Press
Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).
Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue.
Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com
