Summmer Reads that Refuse Escapism 
by Louis Parks for YUNG

Leena Aboutaleb's THALASSA approaches grief through water, mythology, memory, and Palestinian identity, creating a poetry collection that feels submerged in atmosphere rather than structured around narrative clarity. The poems move slowly and tide-like, allowing emotional meaning to accumulate through repetition, fragmentation, and sensory detail.

Water becomes the collection's dominant language: seas, tides, drowning, salt, and submersion recur throughout, creating movement between exile and homeland, memory and forgetting, life and death. Aboutaleb's imagery is intensely visual without becoming ornamental. Bodies dissolve into landscapes, domestic objects become haunted by absence, and mythology sits beside personal memory with dreamlike fluidity.

What makes THALASSA especially compelling is its refusal to present grief as linear. Loss does not move neatly toward healing. Instead, mourning becomes environmental, inhabiting rooms, coastlines, histories, and inherited trauma. Palestinian identity exists throughout the collection not as a direct declaration but as an emotional condition.

Formally, the book balances accessibility with exper-mentation. Some poems unfold in long lyrical lines while others fracture into whispered fragments where silence becomes as important as language itself. What lingers after reading is less any single poem than the atmosphere the collection creates: haunted, submerged, and quietly sad.