Present Poetry
Present Poetry
Erynn Crittenden
The Ache Is What Moves Me by Zaha Al-Hmoud
4 minutes Posted May 13, 2026 at 1:49 pm.
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Zaha Al-Hmoud is a Jordanian-Canadian poet based in Canada. Born in Jordan, he moved to Canada at six years old.

His first collection, The Ache Is What Moves Me, traces the arc of a psychiatric break and the rebuilding that followed, through running marathons, through writing, through refusing to let the clinical world own the language of what happened.

The poems are grounded in the body, in sky and soil and hands. He writes because he needs a crutch, a lifeline of some sort.