Max Porter describes 48Kg. as ‘one of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read’. I saw the young Palestinian poet, Batool Abu Akleen, at the Southbank International Festival in July 2026, when I heard Cristina Viti read a selection. The audience was mesmerised by their atrocity and beauty. The way Abu Akleen brings together war and the body is chilling. From ‘Consider 37Kg. The leaving game’
He said: Hold the box
open it
take out the scissors
cut out your heart
I touched my heart for the last time
He said I’m leaving
I cried
He whispered: Shhh
don’t cry.
You don’t have a heart anymore
In ‘5Kg. I don’t know how to sew’ the narrator is with her grandmother:
I hold a needle & thread in one hand
& your features in the other.
I look among the doctors who are busy with the living
I look for someone to sew your torn face together again
so I can kiss it
for the last time.
In her introduction, Aku Akleen writes how for a while she stopped writing, ‘believing that poetry wouldn’t change the world’, then realised ‘the importance of giving a form to feelings in order to understand them’. She writes in Arabic but says it is in self-translation that she understands. ‘In Arabic [..] I was afraid of death […] but when I started to translate this book, I made peace with death.’
In the foreword, Cristina Viti, one of the translators, says she encountered Aku Akleen’s work through an anthology dedicated to the memory of Etel Adnan. Her poem, ’47Kg. I didn’t steal the cloud’, won the Barjeel Poetry Prize in 2020 when the poet was 15: ‘I wear the clothes of those who live in their own land/ ‘refugee’ written on my forehead.’
All poems are written in Arabic on the left and English on the right. The title refers to the 48 poems of the collection, numbered in reverse, each testament to a body under siege. In the final poem, ‘IKg’ a soldier ‘sharpens his missile by the kitchen sink’ then takes the speaker ‘to the living room./ the safest spot/ or so I thought.’ where ‘I die without a voice./ he skins me flesh from bone./ cuts me into forty-eight pieces.’
As Jack Underwood says, ‘No one should have to write these incredible, haunting lines, but everyone should read them.’
Mary Mulholland 18th September 2026
