Fady Joudah's Exhibit G is among the first poetry collections of its kind: a multimedia work assembled in the diaspora that, across form, content and voice, never sits anywhere but Gaza. The book charts Palestinian life under what its makers name the US-Israeli genocide, from the 1948 Nakba to the present.

Exhibit G continues Joudah's poetic meditation on language and time — the structural forces of life that genocide strips of stability. Where his previous collection […] (2024) dwelt in silence and its residues, Exhibit G constitutes the utterance finally yielded by the refusal of certain speech. The collection is a collaboration among Joudah, a Palestinian physician and poet from Gaza based in Houston, Texas; Palestinian poets writing from and about Gaza, including Rawan Hussein and Nima Hassan; and the Gaza Soup Kitchen together with the Gazan photographers documenting its work. Moving across poems, essays, photographs and drawings, it gathers, in the reviewer's words, "the many hands, faces, and odes of a people feeding, burying, and naming itself."

The single letter "G" anchors the book: the G of genocide, the G of Gaza in English, which Joudah unfolds into a grammar of ghurbah (exile) and ghurūb (setting or decline). Neither a museum nor an exhibition nor a criminal case document, Exhibit G counters the fleeting "exhibit" the West has made of Palestinian suffering. The reviewer calls the result "a formidable journey through committed verse necessarily without a clear exit for the reader."

Joudah grounds the collection in the Arabic poetic heritage, opening with Labīd at its beginning — "Dark and dirt-trodden now lie their grounds, their people, gone with / years past, months both sacred and profane." Joudah tells us he cannot "turn off time" as it courses through the book, and the war of empires, the battle between "pre-" and "post-", runs through every page. From "Truth is Never Finished":

Because no oxygen for the dead. Then they came for the dirt, and the dirt had no lips, so they tossed our corpses in the street

Against this, the collection's opening lines insist: "I turned my love for you into art, / that I may triumph over death."

The poems document Gaza in concrete, named detail. "Salaam, Ya Salaam" faces a photograph of a woman with an incomplete smile; the page carries her story in verse fractured by the genocide: "Israel killed his younger brother, sister-in-law, and three of their four children: The daughter who survived: Salaam." In lieu of grief, a friend starts a soup kitchen during the annihilation; Israel later assassinates his youngest brother; Salaam goes on to have a baby girl.

Joudah's title poem, "Exhibit G: Surviving Image," pushes against the finality of genocide through the repeated question "What yet?": "Good love will be bread. Water before love. / 'Who smiles when marked for extermination?'" The physician-poet also mobilizes the medical term "fascicle" — a bundle of nerves or fibers — to map Palestinian togetherness under a world predicated on Palestine's extermination: "To stand in line and shout, beg, howl, grin from ear to ear, feel, feel, feel."

Language itself becomes a battlefield. A hanging, standalone "the" meets the "drones overhead, the white noise of genocide." The Hebrew "aleph" displaces the Arabic "alif" that opens Joudah's alphabet, marking what the reviewer describes as the displacement of the poet's Arabic tongue. The book carries the death of Shaban al-Dalou, the nineteen-year-old burned in his bed by Israeli bombs, his death distributed on social media before he could receive his engineering degree.

Rawan Hussein's poems, numbered one through five, structure the collection around Palestinian time: page twelve recalls the 2021 Unity Intifada; page sixty-seven recalls 1967, the Naksa; 2014 recalls Israel's "Battle of Withered Grain," a pronouncement of forced famine begun long before the Gaza Soup Kitchen's formation. Her signature appears in italics before the poem's first line — an inverted, deterritorialized takhallus. "Dawn broke on our heads," she writes: "Alone we grow old tonight / weave hours and wear them, / gobble the terror that runs / down our kids' mouths."

Joudah closes the collection with a claim that doubles as its method: "The Palestinian body creates the overlap zone between Arabic and English. In that zone, the body renders the alphabet illiterate." Against a contemporary scene of diasporic Palestinian poetry often adherent to the literary industry's neutralized politics, Exhibit G insists that no language — Arabic or English — may utter the single letter "G" otherwise. Gaza, the book argues, is the beginning of always.