Expeditions of Projection (2nd Edn.) - leena aboutaleb - PRE-SALE
Expeditions of Projection (2nd Edn.) - leena aboutaleb - PRE-SALE
AUTHOR
leena aboutaleb is an Egyptian and Palestinian writer based between Amman and Cairo. She is in line with the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, with more information here and a letter of solidarity with demands by Writers in Solidarity with Palestine. Her writing is only accessible on platforms who are in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
Her debut full-length poetry collection, THALASSA, is forthcoming with Game Over Books July 2026.
NOTES ON THE FIRST EDITION
Expeditions of Projection is a pamphlet by leena aboutaleb, published by VIBE in 2023. Exploring desire, grief and heartbreak, the pamphlet is a reflective memento into a drenched and inherited displacement.
See the official playlist at Quboz, also available on Youtube Music
Conversation between Summer Farah and leena aboutaleb on Poetry.onl
PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION
"This collection is a rush; Leena's poems are text message & confession, love letter & manifesto, the vulnerable the political the beautiful all at once." - Summer Farah, author of I could die today and live again and The Hungering Years
"the movement in leena aboutaleb’s dispatches weave all our usually compartmentalized dimensions together until we stop asking for directions. i don’t care when or how we are, because the Where is so visceral. the searching is How and it’s how we keep moving. we are in cairo we are in amman we are in hell we are in love and I don’t care about the destination because I want to stay inside of these poems, i want to follow the roving sharp eye of this poet and wind of her voice as it fills every space love has left behind. The simultaneous meditations and muchness of this textural collection ensures I will find and feel something new each time I return to it. I feel brave when I read these poems, like I’m a knife in my own pocket."- Jess Rizkallah, author of the magic my body becomes
"Abundantly anarchic and fastidiously crafted at the same time, this work is a love song for Palestine, Palestinians, diaspora, cities, seas, and love itself. leena aboutaleb is a poet unafraid to embrace a full, dizzying world of references, experiences—from Britney and crushes to Cairo and exile. How lucky we are to dance in the salt and shimmer of this “cosmos erupting.”" - Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be A List of Further Possibilities and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
"Projection is destabilized by its double meaning. It comes from the past to forecast the future; it emerges from one’s interior to shape relation in the now. In her exquisite chapbook Expeditions of Projection, leena aboutaleb moves in the flashes of this strobe, where binaries become beats that are riffed on and revised, and what happens in the dark meets what happens in the light to form a jagged, aching possibility that only becomes sexier for what evades the eye. The here and not-here of these poems is, yes, Ramallah and Amman and Cairo, but these lines aren’t mappable on anything that could be tacked to a classroom wall. To leave, aboutaleb’s poems remind me, is to be otherwise connected; to be far from is to nourish want—want, that place we might meet, become other than we are, and be more ourselves for it. How lucky to be transformed by this fierce, tender gathering. In compressed and crystalline language, aboutaleb writes with the candid intimacy of a best friend and the indelible style of a manicured nail: “breaking yr heart / is the sexiest way to break yr will.”" - Claire Schwartz, author of Civil Service
