"Joudah's poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions."—The Guardian

Emerging in the era of tweets and text messages, poet Fady Joudah has invented a new poetic form: textu. The "u" in textu echoes the one in haiku, and also emphasizes the intimate you. A textu poem has a single rule: be exactly 160 characters long. As theme, form, and style are wide opened, a textu reveals new possibilities and poetry in unexpected ways.

Textu

Your spine a river into the forest
can't tell the neurons for the trees

I light & light
you up with sound profile

threading the image habit
of pleasure

Conscience

When we learn how an infant in the womb
Sleeps precisely in a parent's pose

say with fist closed
pillowing the temple

What will become
of the poem

Fady Joudah is a poet, translator, and emergency room physician. His first book, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He lives near Houston, Texas.