An Interview with Rachel Neve-Midbar, Author of Salaam of Birds

Katy Nguyen: “Drive” is the first poem of this collection. How did you go about deciding this?

Rachel Neve-Midbar: I don’t remember exactly when I chose “Drive” as the first poem for the collection. It was during one of the later reshufflings just before publication. “Drive” was one of the more controversial poems in the collection. Many of my early readers found something in it that didn’t speak to them. It’s an off-kilter poem, at once both representing personal and political conflict. The first poem(s) in any collection should help the reader know how to read the collection. I don’t think I was considering this at the onset, but I think subconsciously I understood that that “off-kilterness” was what I wanted this collection to convey: that no matter where we stand in this conflicted land, we are all in the wrong. And until there is not just peace, but real understanding, forgiveness, and sharing from both sides, we will never attain the stability we all long for.

KN: Besides the title being a line from the late Mahmoud Darwish, is there another reason or meaning behind the salaam of birds to you?

RNM: Over the years, this collection, like all first collections, had many titles. In 2016, I took myself on a writing retreat in Tinos, Greece. I took along several books, including Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah. I love Darwish (and many other Palestinian poets) because so much of the imagery is born in the same land, and the longings also echo what is in my heart. I came across “Sonnet VI” in the collection. The poem is a call to end violence. The last two lines of the sonnet read:

A bit of weakness in metaphor is enough for tomorrow.
For the berries to ripen on the fence, and for the sword to break under dew

The poet understands that his metaphors aren’t really working. How can a few drops of water in nature destroy a sword of metal? Still, he gives us the metaphors anyway. I understand this kind of magical realism. How many times, when I have spoken to people about real peace in Israel/ Palestine, have I encountered rolled eyes and guffaws? I always answer that “I am a poet. My world is dream.” A quote from this sonnet made its way into the coda of the collection, “Salaam of Birds:”

What’s the name of the place your footsteps tattooed on the ground,
a heavenly ground for the salaam of the birds, near echo?

Originally, that piece was called “Dear Marvin,” but when it was picked up at the Georgia Review, the editors there worked with me to perfect the piece. Through revision, the title of the piece changed to “Salaam of Birds,” to quote the sonnet. I then realized that that was the perfect title for the whole collection, that prayer for peace reminds me of a flock of cranes in the sky, and the quote became the epigraph.

KN: Your collection experiments with structure and formatting. Would you say structure and formatting come to you easily, or are they something you revisit? 

RNM: I try to let each poem find its own form. I know there are poets who specialize in certain forms: the prose poem or the Haibun, but I believe that each poem finds its own form. I revise a lot, allowing the poem to change and develop over time and to eventually find its form. It’s the tension between form and structure and music and meaning that, to me, is the most exciting aspect of poetry as an art form. 

KN: Even further, how and when do you decide to end a poem?

RNM: I don’t think the poets “decide” when to end a poem; the poem decides its own end, and it is usually found in revision as we hone and pare back the poem into its shape. 

The poems come. We, the poets, are merely the midwives.

KN: Several of your poems touch upon an intimacy that is expressed through togetherness and physical touch. What is the value of these sentiments and gestures in poetry? 

RNM: Poems that emanate in the physical, in the body—embodied poems—are a large part of what I teach and what I write. There is an inherent intimacy that comes when the images and metaphors of a poem are born in the body. In this book, I wanted to bring in that intimacy, that sense of touch between human beings in their many relationships because ultimately the only solution to human conflicts will be to see each other in our bodies—all human—all fallible. All dreaming that same dream of peace.

KN: Given our current reality, your collection also alludes to violence. How did you navigate the tension of such violence in your poems?

RNM: As I read through this collection in 2025, a collection of poems that were born from the Second Intifada through about 2014 and the Gazan War we experienced that summer, I feel like there is a naivety—even in the poems that express violence. We did live through violence in Israel/Palestine in those years, but nothing like the heartbreaking violence the people in the region are experiencing today. 

In order to write these poems, the violence had to be re-experienced through the writing. The only way to do that was to break the violence down, to give it over to the reader slowly and carefully and always from the human body, to understand that even those who commit violence on every side are also human. This is perhaps best represented in the poem “After Dyce’s Jacob and Rachel.” This is a poem that links the ancient story of the first meeting between star-crossed lovers: Jacob who was running away from his birthright to carry on a nation and the love of his life, Rachel, conflated with the story of an incident from September 9, 2003 when a young woman went the night before her wedding to have a cup of coffee with her father and both were killed in a suicide bombing. In the poem, I refer to the suicide bomber as “a boy”

a boy
oiled into a heavy
suicide vest, the throb 
of his heart exposed 
in the black bomb
under his coat, fast he hits
the button, and then nothing,

With very short lines and only the smallest hint of description, and by placing that description within the boy’s deep body, the reader can feel empathy for the bomber even as he commits an act of violence. It’s the only way the poem can work. Without labeling or name-calling, stepping out of the political and allowing the losses that pile up after a violent act to speak for themselves. Not only were the bride and her father killed, but the boy too. In violence, in war, in hatred, everybody loses. 

KN: With this poetry collection, readers become especially aware of the role and burden of a witness. Why must there be more poems of witnessing? 

RNM: Today, in these shockingly terrible times, we are all being called on to witness. The question becomes who can witness? Do we need to be inside Gaza today to write about what is going on there? Do we need to be standing on the streets of New York City when some innocent person is being scooped off the street and shoved into an unmarked car? Is it enough if we read about these things and simply feel them deeply? Who has the “right” to witness? As long as atrocities occur, as long as there are human beings who are unsafe, we must all do what we can to witness. And poetry is often the place to bring that witness to bear.

KN: There is a restless, constantly alert undertone throughout your poetry. Would you say uncertainty or anxiety has impacted your poetic voice in any way? 

RNM: This is such an interesting question. I always worry that the voice in my poems is sort of pounding my reader over the head. I’m not sure if anxiety impacts my voice or if writing about an anxious, dangerous, or upsetting moment wouldn’t bring that voice to the poem. In a collection where I am writing about the breakup of my marriage while surrounded by the more global events of life in Israel/Palestine, it’s not surprising that what comes through is poetry that conveys something unsettled. It makes sense. 

KN: Readers come across the Hebrew language in this collection. Was this linguistic decision something you always had in mind? 

RNM: I think anyone—everyone—who lives between two languages, all people who are bilingual and using two or more languages in their everyday life tend to code switch in their head. That code switching is my inner music and, though sometimes it causes all words to disappear completely, usually it means that I tend to use whatever word in whichever language makes the most sense in the moment. My kids and I called it Hebrish (the melding of English and Hebrew) and it was our everyday language at home. It is so common to do this in Jewish communities that whole dialects (Yiddish and Landino) have been born of the mix of Hebrew with other languages. Allowing Hebrew, whether as prayer or everyday language into my poems is simply the way I think—the music of my heart.

KN: In putting together this collection, did Salaam of Birds go through many changes? (For instance, reading aloud, editing, sharing the poems?)

RNM: This collection began in the middle of my MFA at Pacific University. In a low-residency program, we were required to send a number of poems, revisions, and book reviews to our mentor once a month. I had been keeping the poems I was writing about my life in Israel/Palestine to myself. Then, in the second month in the second semester of the program, I hadn’t written enough “other” poems, and I included one of the poems I had written about my life. Kaboom. I was working with the poet David St. John. He immediately wrote back and asked me if I had more like that poem. I easily took another 20 poems off my desk and sent them along. The next thing I knew, I had won the 2013 Clockwork Prize from Tebot Bach and I had a chapbook coming out with a very respected publisher. The poems in that chapbook, What the Light Reveals, became the basis for the whole collection. An early version of Salaam was my graduation thesis at Pacific under the watchful eye of Marvin Bell (z”l). More poems were written. I got divorced and moved to the desert. The collection changed titles and the poems within many, many times. I took online workshops, worked on poems with friends, revised and revised. But it wasn’t until I had already started my PhD at USC that the collection won the 2018 Patricia Bibby Prize from my original publisher, Tebot Bach. Even post-acceptance, the collection continued to change and develop, again with the help of David St. John and my cohort at USC. Many years and many changes, so much love and attention went into this collection. I think that is a big part of its strength.

KN: The coda of this collection is a series of powerful, moving letters. Can you speak a little more on why you chose to end the collection with them? Conversation and correspondence appear to be a prevalent theme here. 

RNM: I wrote the coda during that trip to Greece, 2016. I took 10 days off work and booked a little cabin 8 steps from the water in a mostly deserted bay called Agios Romanos on the island of Tinos. I knew I needed to finally sit with the manuscript and begin to prepare it for submission. On the plane, I read through the poems and realized I had nothing written about the Gaza war in 2014, a war in which my son wore a soldier’s uniform, though he was still in his training. I had taken books with me: Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish, and more. I spent the days swimming across the bay, listening to poems on YouTube as I walked up and down the beach. I was completely alone, and still I couldn’t find a way into the work. Nothing, nothing helped. 

Finally, I thought to go back to that summer in another way—to read through the correspondence I shared with my mentor during the summer of 2014, the incomparable Marvin Bell (z”l). None of the letters in the coda match the actual letters I shared with Marvin. He was a tremendously caring teacher, and during the war, he wrote to me just about every day. Just re-reading them allowed me to revisit those days, what I was thinking and feeling and how my attitudes about terrorism and defense—war—were changing. There was nothing brought directly from those emails into “Salaam of Birds,” but the idea to write about that inner change in an epistolary format seemed a good one. After that, the writing just spilled onto the page. The title here too changed when I read Darwish’s “Sonnet VI” that appears in his book The Butterfly’s Burden in Fady Joudah’s translation. Joudah brilliantly left the line “salaam of birds,” allowing a transliterated word, keeping that gorgeous multi-syllabic Arabic word for peace. I knew that was not only the title of the piece, but the permanent title of the whole collection, as the whole book ultimately is a prayer for peace.

KN: Finally, despite the heavy themes of your poetry, there is still beautiful imagery and hope and survival. Your words convey how life can, still, and even must go on. Was this one overarching theme you hoped to achieve?

RNM: Thank you so much for this compliment. The desert taught me this lesson. Most of this collection was written next to a rhythmic stream called “Ein Mabua” in the Judean Desert. In the middle of dunes, in every direction, was a natural spring that would start and stop. Next to the spring was an aqueduct from the Roman Era, built in the year 7 CE. There are only about 100 rhythmic streams in the world. It occurs through very certain manifestations of underground pools and limestone pipes. The first time I saw the entire pool drain and then a few minutes later replenish itself, I thought it must be man-made. Beyond the pool is a waterfall that starts and stops. Birds fly in and out of the greenery that grows near the waterfall. When the water stops and the river empties, the fish dive under the rocks until the flow returns. And it’s a miracle each time it does: the sound of the water first, and then just a glimpse of the flow, and then the trickle at the waterfall, and then suddenly the river flowing full force over the rocks and the water falling like a shower. Birds and flowers and butterflies. And all of this in the midst of the burning desert. A real oasis. That is where this book was written—within an oasis, inside that hope.

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Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach, 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014, winner of The Clockwork Prize) and Thought and New Language in the Menstrual Poem (Palgrave MacMillan, upcoming). Rachel is co-editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia, 2023). She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to translate Holocaust poet Abba Kovner. Rachel is also the Poetry Editor at Calul Journal. More at rachelnevemidbar.com.

Katy Nguyen is a University of California, Irvine graduate. She enjoys reading and writing about the little things, music, and peoplehood. In her spare time, she likes to peruse around stationery shops and add more pens to her growing collection.