Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.

Noor Hindi’s Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. gathers hybrid, essayistic poems that delve into the complexities of living in the United States as a queer Palestinian-American woman caught between conflicting identities. “I don’t like the Middle East. I don’t like America,” writes Noor in “Confession.” Using poetic tools like erasure and collage, and by weaving together elements of biography and journalism, Noor allows us to experience the push and pull between the speaker’s two vocations as poet and journalist, as she considers what it means to work in “an industry that headlines / my people dead.” 

The titular “Yellow” threads its way through the collection, as in “Dabke,” where “we plunge into the yellow weep—/And linger,” and when, in another poem, the speaker asks, “how far does a hurt stretch / before it yellows?” Throughout this work there is an abrasive interrogation of poetry’s ability to handle tragedy effectively. In a series of poems titled “Breaking [News],” Noor posits: “Reporting is an act of violence—poetry one of warmth.” But these poems often produce an intentional cacophony, as the speaker’s personal history is spliced with news headlines. “Good Muslims Are All Around Us” lets headline after headline spill across the page to highlight their absurdity: “Muslim Woman Disarms Anti-Islam Protester with a Hug.” While such poems are effective in their directness, there are quieter, more haunting poems that trace the ways in which violence is often embedded in childhood memories, as in these non sequiturs from “Summertime”:

I once killed
A lot of bees with a plastic bat.
They invaded my friend’s backyard.
Tiny sunlights quivering in the air

The moon recurs in this collection, a beloved poetic symbol that is simultaneously present and out of reach for a poet occupied with more pressing matters. “Ask me to pledge allegiance // to a moon that won’t answer my calls” laments the speaker in a poem about the difficulties of fitting in. Throughout, images from the natural world affirm an almost otherworldly sense of grief and desperation experienced by the real people at the heart of sensationalist headlines: 

Our gloom as loud as shells.
Listen. Even the ocean begs.