To call 70,000 a work of poetry is a disservice. 70,000 is an entire gallery of mixed-media art, a zine and a chapbook and soul brought to life on paper. This is the kind of book I would love to own as a physical copy. The author’s approach to a loss so big and yet intangible is evidence of her skill as a therapist. I also particularly enjoy her narratives because it stretches back to BEFORE the current war. Many of these pieces hurt, viscerally, to read: this is a hurt decades old, a hurt of violence and of great losses. I want to read this again and again, but I also know how it will make me cry. Free Palestine. Aluta continua.

What a great piece of work to highlight the Palestinian tragedies that have engulfed the Palestinian people for decades. 70,000 is the number of books that were stolen from people's homes and libraries in 1948, and the author set out to write every number up to 70,000, incorporating numbers into sketches and images.
Thank you, Netgalley for the chance to read this book of poetry.

70,000 by Lena jawdat is a devastating poetry collection about a Palestinian author trying to cope with a horrifying history. Every page with Jawdat’s scribbles of attempting to write a number for each book stolen and lost made me feel something so deeply, I could only read a few pages at a time because I got so emotions my heart rate would jump all over the place.

Lenna Jawdat's collection 70,000: Poems adeptly centers both the displacement of Palestinian's and the poet's experience as a Palestinian American longing for her ancestral home. How do you comprehend a grief like this? We see Jawdat attempt—as both a poet and a mental health professional—to answer this by enumerating losses, writing the numbers 1 to 70,000 to represent each book confiscated from the Palestinian people. The poet also explores this grief through media and structure. She includes photos, illustrations, and even a recipe, which really enhanced the collection rather than distracting from it. Though this is the poet's first collection, there is no shortage of experimentation with form. There are poems that incorporate Arabic, poems in the form of experiment designs and definitions, all of them asking: is this the right way to understand loss? I found this collection polished, timely, and impactful. There were times that I felt that the language spelled things out a bit too much. I don't know if that was taste or if the poet is still learning to trust her reader. Either way, I feel like everyone would benefit from reading this.

Thank you to NetGalley and Central Avenue Publishing for this e-ARC!

I'm really at a loss to know where to begin with this review. This collection of reflections, poetry and artwork will stay with me for a long long time. Jawdat gives a very visual representation of the loss of 70,000 Palestinian books and the subsequent erasure of a history of the Palestine people in a thoughtful and beautifully poignant way with personal reflections, historic facts and beautifully imagined imagery which tries to encapsulate the vastness of the loss. With her lead, I found myself trying to imagine this loss (although not persona for me) in similar terms - from imagining how long it would take me to read 70,000 books, or how much history would be regained should one copy of each of the 70,000 books be reclaimed( found) .
This book is a work of resilience, loss, exploration, exposure, bravery and so much more. It moved me to tears, made my heart throb with the injustice of it all and evoked anger and frustration.
Truly worth reading. I promise it will stay with you for a long time.

Reading this feels like having a fist clenched around your heart on every page, with a stronger squeeze in every picture. Conveying a horror (His)story through bittersweet words can hurt so much more.
I can only be grateful for the desolation it leaves me with and the hope for humanity that begins to flourish through the prose.

In 1948, alongside the other events that comprised the formation of the Israeli state, some 70,000 books were removed from Palestinian homes and libraries. Some 6,000 are now in Israeli libraries, where most Palestinians cannot access them; the remaining 64,000 have presumably been lost to history. Jawdat, herself a poet of Palestinian descent, set out to illustrate this loss in the simplest of ways: by writing out the numbers 1 to 70,000.

The numbers start out simply—columns on a page. The columns tighten as Jawdat seeks to fit more numbers on each page, pens change, the columns expand and contract and fit themselves into and around art, interspersed with history (family history, Palestinian history) in the form of poetry.

"I ask my partner to help me write numbers," notes Jawdat. "He wrote less than 20 before tiring." (168*)

This is an inherently political book—there is no way for it not to be—and it is sharp and pointed and painful. Palestine is for Jawdat an abstraction to a point, a place her forebears fled and a place she does not know if she will ever be allowed to visit. And it is also, to her, an intensely real place, one tied up in family and scent and memory and war. And still a place she does not know if she will ever be allowed to visit.

What I like in poetry is sometimes idiosyncratic, but I like poetry that asks me to work for it, that asks me to think, that do something interesting with form. And this delivers in *spades*. My favorite poetry collection that I've read in a good long time.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

This book really moved me so deeply just based on the fact of why it even exists. How do you process, cope, document the loss and erasure of culture and work in so many books. I appreciated the way in which this book unfolds. I go with the flow as she tries to make some sort of sense of it through this collection of work.