How totally must a heart break so that gratitude is repeatedly uttered on our lips? In Alhamdulillah Anyway, Moudi Sbeity responds by holding the grief of witnessing the genocide in Gaza and the war in Lebanon alongside praise for existing at all. As a queer Muslim who stutters, Sbeity’s debut collection intimately addresses how language and narrative author our collective experience. His poems reach across the divide of border and ideology and into the shared pulse of being, pointing toward the possibility of liberation through a framework of compassion, forgiveness, and awe. So that even with all the difficulties we each face daily, even with all the atrocities of our world, still alhamdulillah-the quieter sister to hallelujah-can be uttered as our final song of gratitude.
Moudi Sbeity fearlessly addresses the terror in our broken hearts, the “chaos of a blazing world,” and at the same time he invites us to gather on the “torn ground” and find the holiness in and all around us. Again and again, he dares to reimagine and remake the world into a place of kindness, tenderness, and gratefulness. This book is more than an invitation to awe, it’s a transmission. These are poems to change the world.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path
Moudi Sbeity’s poems have become touchstones for me, markers on the path toward greater awareness and awakening. Reading each one in Alhamdulillah Anyway is akin to striking a singing bowl: the resonance extends far beyond the moment of his personal experience and touches on the universal each time. This collection is, in Moudi’s own words, “a prayer we can sing every night, a well-being wish, a remnant of Arabic sorrow . . . we can offer the world and each other before going into that good night.” A deep, hard-won and “endless compassion” radiates from every page.
James Crews, author of Turning Toward Grief and co-editor of Love Is for All of Us
Moudi Sbeity writes with such reverence and sensory precision that the poems feel deeply tactile-almost edible. In the face of an often brutal world, this book insists on tenderness and the courage to imagine something better. Alhamdulillah Anyway does not look away from devastation, it shows us how to keep loving anyway.
Elise Powers, author of The Size of Your Joy
The poems in Alhamdulillah Anyway manage to convey the ugliness and inhumanity of war and oppression, prejudice and incomprehension, otherness and comparison with a remarkable lens of compassion, nostalgia, and love. Beautifully rendered details and thoughtful language kept me wanting to read the next poem and the next. This is a necessary and timely collection to bring into the world.
Ellen Rowland, author of No Small Thing
Alhamdulillah Anyway is alive with wonder-tuned poems of witness and compassion where “belonging is stitched by the / utterance of a kind gaze.” Sbeity creates a word shelter generous enough to encompass suffering and hope with space for our shared “lineage of water and dirt.” I will be fervently pressing copies of this must-read book into many hands.
Laura Grace Weldon, author of Portals, former Ohio Poet of the Year
In these potent poems, rockets sink through desert skies, children walk ancient streets with bags of warm bread held tight like holy books, grandmothers feed revolutions with practiced hands, olives are both the most sacred feast and the bodies of ancestors ready to give a new generation life, and God turns out to be a gentle heart who answers all questions with love. Like his family’s olive oil, Sbeity’s Alhamdulillah Anyway is so pleasant to consume yet serves to heal the deepest of wounds. It is a gift of great love to the world as is its author.
Alexander Shalom Joseph, author of Our Mother, The Mountain
Alhamdulillah Anyway by Moudi Sbeity helps us dream into the great medicine of tenderly maintaining our shared humanity. To read these poems is to break bread with his Lebanese family, to fall in love with this world lit by sunrise, and to ache with the terrible, raw absurdity of war. Sbeity’s masterfully crafted work is a vivid example of living a commitment to embody true care through the mundane, the exquisite, and the ruthless moments, all.
Brooke Teisui McNamara, author of Bury the Seed
Moudi Sbeity
is a Lebanese-American poet, author, and contemplative educator. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by the New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Orison’s Best Spiritual Literature. As a lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. He is also the author of the memoir Habibi Means Beloved.