Fady Joudah's, "The Earth in the Attic" is this year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his poems Joudah explores big themes - identity, war, religion, what we hold in common - while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific. Contest judge Louise Gluck describes the poet in her Foreword as 'that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession...have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas'. She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, 'These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. "The Earth in the Attic" is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget'.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American medical doctor and a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. He is also the translator of Mahmoud Darwish's recent poetry The Butterfly's Burden.

"The Earth in the Attic underscores Fady Joudah''s great talent for exacting naked feelings that engage the age-old mysteries of this world, while maintaining a levelheaded residence amidst the everyday vagaries of modern life. The poems here radiate from the personal out into the larger world, propelling along moments of light and transcendence. With a quiet certainty, Fady Joudah names those ordinary things that hold everything in focus, grounded in a fabular mystery that resonates in the twenty-first century."-Yusef Komunyakaa