Theories of Return, by Sara Abou Rashed

Theories of Return by Sara Abou Rashed
 
About the Collection
Theories of Return is an urgent and unflinching poetry collection that resists both literal and literary erasure, asserting the right to exist. In these pages, Sara Abou Rashed’s voice does not ask permission but commands attention, bearing witness to exile while refusing silence. As much as the book honors her family’s displacement from Palestine to Syrian refugee camps and later to the U.S., it is ultimately collective rather than confessional, pressing outward to ask universal questions about the ethics of war, ownership, language, motherhood, and intimacy. Each poem operates as its own theory and attempt at return, binding abstraction to lived experience, and inherited history to the brutal clarity of the present moment. Formally daring and emotionally exacting, Theories of Return offers readers poetry that is intellectually rigorous, deeply human, and unafraid to speak.
 
Theories of Return is a searing and intimate poetry collection that reckons with exile, inheritance, and the impossible mathematics of going back. Moving between Gaza, Syria, Palestine, and the diasporic present, Sara Abou Rashed braids lyric intensity with political clarity, refusing abstraction in favor of lived consequence, bodies, borders, language, and grief that multiplies across generations. These poems examine what return means when home is inaccessible and memory is fragmented. Identity is forged under occupation and displacement, yet also insists on tenderness, dark humor, and fierce intelligence as modes of survival. At once formally inventive and emotionally direct, Theories of Return speaks to readers drawn to poetry that confronts history without sacrificing intimacy and that understands language itself as a site of resistance, mourning, and fragile hope.

Praise
Theories of Return is vital not only due to the beauty of its language—the richness of image and metaphor, and not only for its magic with form and shape, but also, vitally, for how it complicates place, home, land, and movement. It charges a reader with the question: what have you taken for granted?
 
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
 
To witness is to see. To bear witness is to testify to what one sees. Sara Abou Rashed’s superb first collection of poetry, Theories of Return, is a document of witness and testimony, seeking justice while also offering, as poetry must, the music and magic of art along with its testimonial vigor. In these distinctive poems, Abou Rashed’s magic conjures the beauty of her Palestinian heritage—the language, the landscapes, the essential customs—yet sometimes she compels the darkest forms of resistance, too, where drawing a single breath may be fraught with peril; as she reveals, even the Arabic word for “martyr” is akin to the word for “inhale.” Just so, Theories of Return promises no romantic transformations but rather the pointed illuminations of a realist. Abou Rashed’s vocation is to shine just such a light, her revelations ranging from etymology to atrocity, from tenderness to the most wrenching resistance: “I refuse to give / my horror / the intimacy / of a name.” Theories of Return is a luminous, shapely, timely gift—as ancient as homeland and as urgent as news.
 
—David Baker, author of Transit
 
“I’m everyone that ever lived to make me,” writes Sara Abou Rashed in her stellar debut, Theories of Return, in which every poem insists on a wholeness that refugee and immigrant life are often forced to preclude. These are poems not merely against erasure, but for Life. Abou Rashed writes with a profoundly Palestinian sensibility, for and towards Life—not an idealized life, but a full and fully human one, with all its chaos, griefs, losses, and contradictions. “We walk the limits of what can be said to keep alive our dead/What, if anything else is language?” In this poet’s hands, language is capacious enough to hold lived and inherited memory and to unravel the limits of distance, illuminating the unsaid, the elisions and shadows, and imagining a future tense.
 
—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, author of Something About Living
 
“It Comes Down to This” is an example of a crucial poem expressing the Palestinian experience of the past century—but ALL the poems in this debut book by the wondrous Sara Abou Rashed are just as crucial. After so much pain and injustice, people sometimes find it hard even to speak. But not Sara, who has a mighty way of condensing horrific history into luminous human story and image, which keeps us living—the beauty and depth of Palestinian reality regaining its breath. Injustice cannot win. With her keen eye and immense heart, Sara’s poems dissolve it.
 
—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist
 
About the Author:
Sara Abou Rashed is a Palestinian poet, speaker, and creator of the one-woman show A Map of Myself. A former poetry fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, her work has been commended by the UK Forward Prize and was awarded the 2023 Hopwood Award for Poetry from the University of Michigan, where she earned her MFA. Sara’s writing appears in The Kenyon Review, The LA Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, the McGraw Hill Language Arts curriculum, and in the anthologies A Land with a People, Heaven Looks Like Us, and Ask the Night for a Dream, among others. Sara lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she's pursuing a PhD in English at The Ohio State University. Theories of Return is her debut collection. 
 
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Bibliographic Information
ISBN: 978-1-939728-73-9
PUBLICATION DATE: March 1, 2026
AUTHOR: Sara Abou Rashed