WE HAD MANSIONS by Mandy Shunnarah

We Had Mansions by Mandy Shunnarah
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About the Collection
In the spirit of documentary poetics, We Had Mansions is a luminous and unflinching debut by queer Palestinian Appalachian poet and journalist Mandy Shunnarah. Blending archival research with lived experience, Shunnarah composes poems that bear witness to the fractured geographies of diaspora, the disinformation campaigns that erase Palestinian humanity, and the personal and collective grief that is carried across generations.
 
These poems trace an intricate web of inheritance: the displacement of the Nakba and the echoes of exile in Alabama’s Bible Belt; religious trauma shaped by evangelical fundamentalism; the contradictions of assimilation; and the painful reconciliation of a family history marked by addiction, silence, and loss. With fierce clarity and lyrical precision, Shunnarah interrogates how Palestinians are depicted in Western media and asserts a counter-narrative rooted in truth, emotion, and unshakeable love for the homeland.
 
We Had Mansions resists reducing Palestinians to mere symbols of suffering. Alongside poems of resistance and survival, there are odes to joy, desire, and the domestic. Here, the sacred is complex, and the mythic is recast in the light of diaspora, with every love poem also serving as a Palestine poem. With formal dexterity and unwavering moral vision, Shunnarah claims space for a voice that is too often erased, transforming rage into testimony and tenderness into resistance. This is a vital new collection from a poet of searing insight and an expansive heart.
 
Praise
We Had Mansions is a stunning collection that operates against erasure, against mis-naming and misrepresentation of a land, a people, or history. Each poem is its own beautiful reclamation, teeming with touchable imagery and the rich interior of memory, of lives that were full, and remain full. 
 
--Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year 
 
Mandy Shunnarah writes about and from the Palestinian heart -- in all its brokenness, expansiveness, its glory, its love for the world. 
 
--Susan Muaddi Darraj, Behind You Is the Sea 
 
Written with the urgency our present moment demands—where the genocide in Palestine is livestreamed on phone screens and abetted by the West, where the dehumanization and erasure of an entire people is a playbook and not a war crime, where the value of Arab life is up for debate and famine is spun as strategy—We Had Mansions reminds us why the truth matters. As Mandy Shunnarah writes, “& because they chose not to see, they’ll claim / it must never have been there at all.” These poems carry the truth like a torch. Let us not look away.  
 
--Ruth Awad, Outside the Joy 
 
We Had Mansions incisively explores the intersections of homeland and diaspora, religion and cynicism, and the body as resistance and self-love. In searing and stirring language, Shunnarah deconstructs the American Dream and the implications of its failed promise and contradictions which continue to reverberate between their Palestinian and white identities. An incessant question drives this gorgeous collection: how do we, at once, reckon with our yearning to belong, our inheritance of privilege, and our complicity in dispossession and erasure? Shunnarah invites readers on this powerful quest for truth and understanding.  
 
--Sahar Mustafah, The Beauty of Your Face 
 
Mandy Shunnarah’s expansive docupoetics navigates through and around expectations of what writing diaspora, especially Palestinian diaspora, should look like. Looking to the past to look forward, with gutting punchlines, We Had Mansions is a playful, visionary critique of “separation barriers, their false borders,” an ode to community, the body, and the ability to love and be loved. We Had Mansions is a wise, irreverent, and groundbreaking poetry debut. 
 
--Lisa Low, Crown for the Girl Inside 
 
About The Author
Mandy Shunnarah(they/them) is an Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer in Columbus, Ohio. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. They won the Porter House Review 2024 Editor’s Prize in Poetry and are supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in 2024 from Belt Publishing. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com and follow them on Instagram at @offthebeatenshelf.
 
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Bibliographic Information
ISBN: 978-1-939728-70-8
PUBLICATION DATE: July 1, 2025
AUTHOR: Mandy Shunnarah