We Had Mansions by Mandy Shunnarah (and cats!)

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In the spirit of documentary poetics, We Had Mansions is a luminous and unflinching debut by queer Palestinian Appalachian poet and journalist Mandy Shunnarah. This remarkable collection expands the possibilities of what poetry can hold and how it can bear witness. Shunnarah writes with a voice that is both fierce and intimate, blending documentary poetics with lived experience to create a work deeply rooted in history, memory, and the body. The poems navigate the dislocations of diaspora, the enduring trauma of the Nakba, and the sharp contradictions of growing up Palestinian and Appalachian in the American South. Through layered imagery, archival fragments, and lyric precision, Shunnarah resists the flattening of identity, offering a chorus of voices and experiences that pulse with complexity and care.

Blending archival research with lived experience, Shunnarah bears witness to the fractured geographies of diaspora, the disinformation campaigns that erase Palestinian humanity, and the personal and collective grief that has been carried across generations. Hanif Abdurraqib describes We Had Mansions as “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.”

Shunnarah traces a complex web of inheritance: the displacement of the Nakba and its echoes in Alabama’s Bible Belt, religious trauma rooted in fundamentalist Christianity, the contradictions of assimilation, and the weight of addiction, exile, and loss. Shunnarah writes with fierce clarity and lyrical precision, examining how Palestinians are portrayed in Western media and asserting a counter-narrative grounded in truth, emotion, and an unyielding love for the homeland, or as Susan Muaddi Darraj observes, “Mandy Shunnarah writes about and from the Palestinian heart—in all its brokenness, expansiveness, its glory, its love for the world.”

This collection refuses to reduce Palestinians to symbols of suffering. Alongside poems of rage and resistance are odes to domestic life, queer love, and the body as both burden and sanctuary. Shunnarah’s poems explore longing and return, unlearning shame, and watching the sky for warplanes while holding out hope for tenderness. Ruth Awad praises the collection as “written with the urgency our present moment demands... These poems carry the truth like a torch. Let us not look away.” With formal dexterity and searing vision, We Had Mansions resists the flattening gaze of empire. Sahar Mustafah describes the collection as “a powerful quest for truth and understanding,” one that explores how we reconcile our inherited privilege with our complicity in systems of dispossession and how we endure in the aftermath of losing land, language, and lineage. Lisa Low adds, “Shunnarah’s expansive docupoetics navigates through and around expectations of what writing diaspora, especially Palestinian diaspora, should look like. We Had Mansions is a wise, irreverent, and groundbreaking poetry debut.”

Shunnarah does not shy away from the brutal realities of colonial violence or the personal costs of exile, but the work does not crumble under their weight either. Moments of joy, sensuality, humor, and domestic tenderness are interwoven with grief and rage. The collection never displays pain merely for recognition. Instead, it emphasizes the richness of Palestinian life, accommodating contradiction, dreaming, and fierce love. We Had Mansions is not only a brilliant literary achievement—it is a profoundly human book that will linger with readers long after the last page. This is not just a poetry collection; it is testimony. It is resistance. It is a love letter to a stolen homeland and to those who remain, endure, and remember.

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All proceeds from the sale of We Had Mansions will be donated to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund

Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer based in Columbus, Ohio. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. They won the Porter House Review 2024 Editor’s Prize in Poetry and are supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was released in 2024 from Belt Publishing. Read more at Mandy's website and follow them on Instagram at @offthebeatenshelf.

Meet Mandy’s “first readers” Tiny, Captain, Sassy, Page, and Pepita:

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