The title hole in this book is a Dearborn birthmark heartbreak paced by periods. A star from farther and farther afar. The hole is a search for love inside the “o” in “poetry,” but “outside of patriarchy” and “global whiteness” (obvs). A place to hide the entire diaspora of the disposable, a home in the hostland, the ahistorical container that presently holds Kamelya Omayma Youssef. It hones her emptiness as she spirals around and down the drain. But the hole is also a constraint: to be stole away and thrown in solitary (say something here about visibility). The hole has particularly feminist undertones and overtones and regular ol’ tones (obvs). An Arab woman’s journal “for processing and maybe a gnosis.” The documentation of self: an infinite list of so little. A bullet in your gullet, a bully pulpit, a bottomless well. Or the hole as alternative to the holy for the revolutionary subject. An abject mass asterisked with a glint of gold. A book with a hole in it by Kamelya Omayma Youssef (Wendy’s Subway, 2022).
