“my ovaries have been in the hands of men on both sides,” Nathalie Khankan writes in this extraordinary debut, which depicts the experience of conceiving a Palestinian child using Israeli assisted reproductive technology. In everyday, understated language, Khankan precisely renders the paradoxes of empire, technology, and survival that define this experience. The poems take form mostly as prose blocks in fluid lowercase, syntax broken by vertical lines, their tone marked by attentive irony and moving directness.” —Hilary Plum, Cleveland Review of Books

“Urgent and open-hearted, this absorbing debut collection has Khankan musing, "to say i once wrote an email to mahmoud darwish i don’t know if he saw about being newly arrived in the occupied territories | before i knew to call it territory."
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“Nathalie Khankan’s Quiet Orient Riot astounds with shattering, shimmering lyricality… a deeply personal poetic narrative that traces her journey toward motherhood in the midst of demographic and territorial crises… The poems of this collection talk to each other, like neighbors carrying on a conversation through open, opposite-facing windows across the street.”
—Blue Fay, The Daily Californian