Ruth Awad centers the experiences that exist ‘Outside the Joy’

While modern times can appear unrelentingly dark, with climate change-driven weather systems wreaking increased havoc, a pandemic that refuses to entirely release its grip, and genocides unfolding on multiple continents, poet Ruth Awad refuses to look away.

“I don’t want to joy wash things,” said Awad, whose new collection, Outside the Joy, releases on Third Man Books today (Tuesday, Sept. 3) and finds the poet wrangling with everything from her mother’s recent health struggles to the eagerness with which American society continues to bare its teeth. “I feel like there’s been this real push in the literary world to reach for joy and to foreground joy. And we’re even seeing that play out in the election cycle now with Kamala Harris and this we’re the party of joy bullshit. I just don’t have time for it, you know? I think there is resonance in naming grief and suffering and hardship as it is. And that doesn’t mean there isn’t also hope. And that doesn’t mean that the light doesn’t come through, because the human experience is expansive. It’s not a monolith.”

This full range is on display in the remarkable Outside the Joy, which has its roots in the poems Awad began crafting after her mother experienced a flare up of her aortic aneurysm in 2022. In the wake of the diagnosis, Awad turned to verse in an attempt to capture the elder’s tender heart and untamable spirit, expressing an initial desire to “memorialize those moments when I loved her sharpest.” Each sharing the title “Mother Of,” these poems dot the collection and depict Awad’s mother splashing red paint across a canvas to create fields of poppies, blazing across the Indiana landscape in a Mitsubishi, her hair streaming in the breeze like an avenging angel, and struggling to catch her breath as she ambles up porch steps in the summer heat.

“What do you do when you realize there might be a limit on the time you get with someone you love, and someone who has not only shaped your whole life but brought you into existence in the first place?” said Awad, who will appear as part of “Rhapsody & Refrain” at Streetlight Guild on Friday, Sept. 6, and again at a book release event at Two Dollar Radio HQ on Thursday, Sept. 12. “And once I realized my mom’s story was going to be one of the through lines of the collection, I started moving from personal poems about our relationship to motherhood and more abstract questions, like, ‘What kind of mothering do I do?’ And everything else rippled out from there.” 

These outward ripples take many forms, with Awad confronting everything from toxic masculinity (“Men Compliment Me”) and the void left within a person when a treasured pet dies (“Years We Lived Close to the Bone”) to the frequently bloodthirsty and ugly elements present within American society. “I’m watching my country admire its teeth,” she writes in “The One Where I Beg,” a poem inspired by a phrase Awad first encountered early in the rise of Donald Trump (“the cruelty is the point”), and one that has continued to evolve and take on new meaning, its opening now calling to mind the genocide unfolding with U.S. support in Gaza.

“And I think that’s because some of the themes these poems are grappling with are constants,” Awad said. “It’s like June Jordan writing about American racism. How much has that really changed? That’s one of the qualities that poetry can take on when it’s exploring systems of oppression and larger inequities in our culture.”

Part of the tension and the beauty in Outside the Joy comes from the tug that exists between these mounting catastrophes both global and personal and the poet’s expressed desire to remain tender in the face of such hardship. In the collection opening “Reasons to Live,” for one, Awad writes of the need to “let the world soften you with its touching.”

“And that is the balancing act,” Awad said. “It feels like every day is a choice to keep existing, so what do you reach for? And that’s kind of what began the project of the book. And then it kind of found its narrative footing in threading in my mother and her experiences with her failing heart and how we’re navigating that. And, yeah, you have to reach for hope, I think, because what otherwise can keep you going?”

For Awad, research and writing have always existed hand in hand as a means of finding solid footing amid uncertainty. So, in the wake of her mother’s diagnosis, she set about learning everything she could about aortic aneurysms, the forms of treatment available, and the expected health outcomes. Similar wormholes helped shape poems set in Lebanon or informed by the climate crisis, with Awad allowing that she feels better prepared to navigate this “deeply chaotic, mostly cruel world” when she has access to more and better information. 

For some, this quest for knowledge could introduce a grim sense of reality. But for Awad, it’s more often the opposite, and part of her magic as a poet stems from this ability to apply her knowledge in a way that deepens the sense of mystery and wonder in her verses.

“If I’m beginning a project, I don’t know what I don’t know, and research is a way to start getting some shading around the boundaries of the subject,” Awad said. “I think the research, for me, helps open the doors to more questions instead of just allowing me to come to the page with the answer outright.”