BOOKS

 
 

We Had Mansions

In the spirit of documentary poetics, We Had Mansions is a luminous and unflinching debut by queer Palestinian Appalachian poet and journalist Mandy Shunnarah. Blending archival research with lived experience, Shunnarah composes poems that bear witness to the fractured geographies of diaspora, the disinformation campaigns that erase Palestinian humanity, and the personal and collective grief that is carried across generations.

These poems trace an intricate web of inheritance: the displacement of the Nakba and the echoes of exile in Alabama’s Bible Belt; religious trauma shaped by evangelical fundamentalism; the contradictions of assimilation; and the painful reconciliation of a family history marked by addiction, silence, and loss. With fierce clarity and lyrical precision, Shunnarah interrogates how Palestinians are depicted in Western media and asserts a counter-narrative rooted in truth, emotion, and unshakeable love for the homeland.

We Had Mansions resists reducing Palestinians to mere symbols of suffering. Alongside poems of resistance and survival, there are odes to joy, desire, and the domestic. Here, the sacred is complex, and the mythic is recast in the light of diaspora, with every love poem also serving as a Palestine poem. With formal dexterity and unwavering moral vision, Shunnarah claims space for a voice that is too often erased, transforming rage into testimony and tenderness into resistance. This is a vital new collection from a poet of searing insight and an expansive heart.

Praise

We Had Mansions is a stunning collection that operates against erasure, against mis-naming and misrepresentation of a land, a people, or history. Each poem is its own beautiful reclamation, teeming with touchable imagery and the rich interior of memory, of lives that were full, and remain full.

—Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year

Mandy Shunnarah writes about and from the Palestinian heart -- in all its brokenness, expansiveness, its glory, its love for the world.

—Susan Muaddi Darraj, Behind You Is the Sea

Written with the urgency our present moment demands—where the genocide in Palestine is livestreamed on phone screens and abetted by the West, where the dehumanization and erasure of an entire people is a playbook and not a war crime, where the value of Arab life is up for debate and famine is spun as strategy—We Had Mansions reminds us why the truth matters. As Mandy Shunnarah writes, “& because they chose not to see, they’ll claim / it must never have been there at all.” These poems carry the truth like a torch. Let us not look away.

—Ruth Awad, Outside the Joy

We Had Mansions incisively explores the intersections of homeland and diaspora, religion and cynicism, and the body as resistance and self-love. In searing and stirring language, Shunnarah deconstructs the American Dream and the implications of its failed promise and contradictions which continue to reverberate between their Palestinian and white identities. An incessant question drives this gorgeous collection: how do we, at once, reckon with our yearning to belong, our inheritance of privilege, and our complicity in dispossession and erasure? Shunnarah invites readers on this powerful quest for truth and understanding.

—Sahar Mustafah, The Beauty of Your Face

Mandy Shunnarah’s expansive docupoetics navigates through and around expectations of what writing diaspora, especially Palestinian diaspora, should look like. Looking to the past to look forward, with gutting punchlines, We Had Mansions is a playful, visionary critique of “separation barriers, their false borders,” an ode to community, the body, and the ability to love and be loved. We Had Mansions is a wise, irreverent, and groundbreaking poetry debut.

—Lisa Low, Crown for the Girl Inside

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Bibliographic Information:

ISBN: 978-1-939728-70-8

PUBLICATION DATE: July 1, 2025

Press

 

Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland

A guided tour of one of the Midwest’s most vibrant subcultures, one DIY ramp at a time.

The American Midwest may not have a reputation as the nation’s skating mecca, but maybe it should. In Midwest Shreds, Mandy Shunnarah travels around the region for a deep dive into its skating culture, detailing the activity’s long, storied history there and the large and diverse skating community that calls the Midwest home today. Here, you’ll learn how skating has become a form of mutual aid in Iowa, follow hard-core street skaters as they vie to become King of Cleveland, experience the transcendence of skating in a converted St. Louis cathedral, meet the anarchists who’ve built their own skate paradise, cinder block by cinder block, in southern Ohio, and encounter skaters from Des Moines, Madison, Chicago, West Lafayette, Detroit, and other corners of the Midwest.

With writing that revels in the crunching scrape of hard wheels, the joy of nailing a trick for the first time, and the grit required to fall and get back up again, Midwest Shreds illuminates a small corner of Midwest life and offers a portrait of the rich cultural history and diversity that makes the region what it is today.

Praise

With writing that revels in the crunching scrape of hard wheels, the joy of nailing a trick for the first time, and the grit required to fall and get back up again, "Midwest Shreds" illuminates a small corner of Midwest life and offers a portrait of the rich cultural history and diversity that makes the region what it is today.

Mandy Shunnarah's "Midwest Shreds: Skating through America's Heartland" must be considered essential reading for fans of skateboarding, rollerskating, and rollerblading. An ideal guide to touring of the Midwest in terms of the sports subculture of skating, "Midwest Shreds" is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library Sports & Travel Guide collections.

-Midwest Book Review
Small Press Bookwatch: August 2024
James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief

Press

Check out my Media Kit and Press Release!

Interview me about Midwest Shreds and/or publish a book excerpt like these fine folks:

 

Book 3 TBA :)