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Is-Was; Practise of Memory
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Chapter (1)
~ THALASSA


Lush and poignant, THALASSA is a love song of misery and grief, tracing leena aboutaleb’s steps as she dives into the underworld in search for her brother. “Like teethbones, I fail to forget you,” aboutaleb bemoans, “I knew you. I knew you.” Dreamlike, her elegy lights the passage of despair and hope as the poet moves between temporalities and worlds, from past and present to seen and unseen realms. Grief is a sea, and leena aboutaleb shows us how to build a boat to find a way home.

THALASSA is a debut, full length poetry collection forthcoming with Game Over Books out on 7 July 2026. Distributed by Asterism Books. For press inquiries, please email giovanna@gameoverbooks.com.  

Pre-orders available at Game Over Books and Asterism Books. Global shipping is available. Please use the contact form for scheduling any readings, events, translation requests, etc.

See the official playlist at Quboz here and on Youtube Music here!

Cover art by Grace Pastore of Figment Print Shop. Manuscript edited by Summer Farah. Layout by Josh Savory. Support Game Over Books on Patreon! 

This project was supported by the McCormack Writing Center (formerly known as the Tin House Workshop) in its Summer 2024 Workshop, as well as Kundiman Summer 2024. 

Praise for THALASSA


leena aboutaleb’s THALASSA is a book of portals, mythic and prophetic at every turn as a sister traverses the underworld on a journey propelled by cataclysmic loss. What lives, what speaks in the aftermath of a brother’s death? In aboutaleb’s hands, the poem is a place to enact, examine, and beckon forth an answer—and that answer resounds love, abiding, alive, and eternal. Roaming through fog and sea, tunneling through grave, garden, and empire, and leaping in all directions across time and borders, a keen-eyed speaker traces the paths of ghosts and all those disappeared. THALASSA excavates the subterranean and subvocal as a practice of faith—only there, only below can the heart begin to bear such bewildering wisdom: “You get one chance in this world. Wait for the next.”
        —Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of THEOPHANIES (Alice James Books, California Book Award)

leena aboutaleb writes with the understanding of “a dialectical relationship between hope and despair...the state of misery.” From inside this state of misery— Palestinian misery, sisterly misery, the misery of being alive in countries addicted to death— THALASSA runs desperately, unceasingly towards love. In this breathtaking debut collection, aboutaleb embodies not a refusal to grief but a grief of refusal, a grief unsatisfied with any myth, any nation, any simplistic reduction, instead insisting we be “melded together into a new myth.” These poems create their own dialectic, between the plain truth of exiled mourning in “I lost you in this alien land” and the stubborn, joyous invocation that “Somewhere love is alive, and somewhere we are there.” That somewhere is here, in these poems; it is a gift to be taken there by Leena.
        —Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, author of TERROR COUNTER (Deep Vellum, longlisted National Book Award)

leena aboutaleb’s debut is a simmering testament to grief—at once tender song, at once mouthfuls of blood. Her voice verges on prayer, repeatedly calling to her late brother, but really, it is an incantation for us, still living. “What am I to do with all this rage?” she asks, as her poems set fire to the constraints of language. And amidst immense loss: for one’s family, for one’s land and people, what burns most brightly is her will to continue writing—that is, to continue on. “Never can they love as us,” and yet, “Never can they be martyred as us.”

Invoking a constellation of underworlds and martyrs from Gilgamesh, to Refaat Alareer, to the Legend of Zelda— she reminds us that we too, “have a right to the Greek pantheon,” and thus, to our own narrative. Through genocide and exile, aboutaleb’s poems sing with unrestrained rage, “I link arms with my martyr, I am your witness.” These poems will haunt you long after you turn the last page, as they will mobilize you in ways poems rarely do—bend you in worship to your ancestral land, hold you in collective witness alongside beloveds in the afterlife, turn language into shrapnel, into light.
        —JinJin Xu, author of There Is Still Singing in the Afterline (Radix)

In THALASSA, Leena Aboutaleb makes the fantastic cerebral, the myth document, and grief into an alchemy. Everything actually is that serious, so strap in, we are going into the underworld. Dreams become portal, as is this book, but I’m wide awake and following the poet down. I don’t want to miss any stone or seed in all this delicate muchness. Refrain becomes prayer, invokes the memory for the remembered to walk through. I feel their presence come forward, raising the hair on my arms. The poet looks toward their oracles until they become oracle, too. Her voice a mist making way for the horizon, and then it’s the horizon. Here. Hear. Listen as this collection fearlessly rages even while it praises. THALASSA is a visceral and honest embodiment of grief that resists a neat bow in favor of the perpetual excavation of always the next word, line, question. This collection is fierce, gentle, not merciful, and divine.
        —Jess Rizkallah, author of the magic my body becomes