Review: Summer Farah’s Zelda-Inspired Poetry Collection Gives Agency to NPCs and Gamers

Summer Farah is an accomplished Palestinian-American poet and editor, nominated for numerous awards like the Pushcart Prize and the Hugo Award. She is an organizer with the Radius of Arab-American Writers and has many editing credits to her name, including work with FIYAH Literary Magazine and Violet, Indigo, Blue, Etc.

In 2024, Farah, alongside Game Over Books, published I could die today and live again, a collection of Zelda-inspired poetry. Farah describes the chapbook as “giving voice to non-player characters and blurring the boundaries of game world and real world.” Readers can purchase a copy for $18 USD to support Farah’s work and celebrate the intersection of video games and poetry.

The table of contents is adoringly titled with the invitation to “Press Any Button to Start,” so let’s examine how Farah brought Zelda to life in poetic storytelling.

Content Warning: This article discusses racism, sexism, Islamophobia, genocide, and the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

 

The Horror and Beauty of Seeing Zelda in the Real World

The poems are an apparent love letter to the Zelda franchise, but it beautifully weaves relatable, real-world themes through the voices of often-dismissed characters, such as Zill from The Wind Waker. Farah speaks of and with NPCs as if they share equal importance to Link and Zelda. These scenes demonstrate how essential relationships with side characters are to the gaming experience and how we are in charge of the depth of our real-life connections. In doing so, the poetry’s lines dig deep into scarily global and deeply intimate themes of grief and regeneration of the world and the self.

This effort from Farah is also a commentary of the genocide in Gaza, using Zelda as a vehicle to explore the cyclical nature of war, memory, death, and denial. The poems are bleak yet resonant of the resistance’s solidarity. To ignore these points by focusing on the escapist video game themes, and distilling this book as merely a Zelda poetry collection, would only underscore the urgency and deftness of Farah’s verses.

The collection’s tone is veiled in a quiet madness, beautifully metaphorized by the recurring motif of Majora’s Mask‘s moon. It begins with the epigraph and follows the reader all the way into the author’s notes. The poems open with lines from Etal Adnan’s Sea and Fog and is tied together with a poignant quote from Kamaro:

Such apprehension, such madness! Is the sea aware that her heroic beauty may be in disuse, someday? The moon never experienced the sinking of empires that she witnessed; day after day, she longs for a shimmering heat. — Adnan

I am disappointed, oh moon. I have died! — Kamaro

The joining of these sentiments paints the contemplative yet lamenting thread of the collection, despite its celebratory undertones representative of the positive impact of worlds that a series only like The Legend of Zelda could create.

 

The Duality of Perspectives

Looking at craft absent of messaging, the stylistic inspiration is honorific to modern greats. It was a joy to see nods to poems like Wendy Xu’s “We Are Both Sure to Die,” as Farah basks in this referentiality thoughtfully. She shows the timelessness of emotive imagery that seemingly transcends across poets into video games and vice versa. Farah also does a wonderful job playing with form and structure, using rigid forms like pantoums to concrete imagery poems. In “Elegy for Lost Friends,” a poem dedicated to A Link Between Worlds, the words carving a Triforce onto the page.

In her poem, “Game Over,” (formerly called “Portrait of Each Moon That Has Seen Link Live”), the speaker ruminates:

… moon with the ghastly face moon I took for granted / … when we encounter our shadow selves every once in a cycle reflective pools reveal our dance I could die today & live again …

This line is one of many times Farah seemingly weaves Easter Eggs for the Zelda fans flipping the pages, yet crafting them in such a way that it reads like the contemporary, associative poetry of both Farah’s inspirations and her signature voice. This allows Zelda fans to gain even more from the chapbook by reading lines of common words, yet be able to see pixels form into even more potent images if they close their eyes. In one of the entries in the “In Another Life Link a Poet” series, she writes:

… shaped by need desire legend / my heart / scattered in pieces across time … it brings me peace it brings me death / I write this verse over and over …

The poem is an intoxicating portrait of the player’s experience in Breath of the Wild, side-questing and Korok-hunting for hundreds of hours knowing the pain Zelda is going through. While there are no implications in the game for delaying the end, there is a complicated peace obtained by letting yourself dive so deep into the world so you can temporarily forget your call to battle.

Farah does not shy away from letting readers embrace the macabre futility of the world’s terror while also lighting the small gifts within it. The Dancing Couple here are the perfect image that could bring this perspective. In “The Way They Dance in Hyrule Square Reprise,” she writes:

THE AIR IS SWEET / YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR / NIGHT IS HERE / YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR

As you read these lines, you can see the iconic couple dancing endlessly, questioning whether to keep going and break the spell merely because the night has arrived. Or, you can stray from your love and fade into the darkness. As Farah comments in the book’s notes, the poem arose from her childhood fear of the ReDeads and the couple’s ability to dance despite everything. The point of view she writes is a representation of her growth in being able to simultaneously acknowledge the horror of the adult phase with the joy of the child phase. It is clear that this thought weaves through the rest of the collection as Farah contemplates destruction across the world.

 

The Call to Action

The layered themes of sociopolitical tension and identity are what make this collection so smart. Farah uses many poems as an opportunity to explore the complexities of girlhood, most significantly in “In Gerudo Valley,” in the words:

… when myths come alive / in holy spaces / thunder crackles / we adorn bodies in oil / women control the heavens / with broken hearts …

The female experience is not the only necessity explored here. Here, she uses the Gerudo to dissect the villainization of a culture, as this people’s history is enshrouded by the bringing of the world’s ultimate evil. It was striking, especially in the brevity of these lines. She takes these lines as a daring chance to contemplate the arguably racist undertones embedded in the Gerudos’ depictions throughout the series. Farah writes how “conflicted” she feels entering their society, knowing how they were painted as the root of all evil in earlier installments, yet became a more complex and empowered society in titles like Tears of the Kingdom.

In an interview with Electric Lit with Ally Ang, Farah comments on this poem in particular, expanding on the cultural nuances:

There is this interesting recognition when you’re a kid playing these games and you’re like, oh, this fantasy setting is supposed to be inspired by my culture, and they’re the villains; that’s kind of weird and it makes me uncomfortable. …

There’s an uncritical embrace of these depictions and a wholehearted indulgence in the violence of sexualization of these vaguely West Asian/North African Muslim women. What does it mean to think that it’s really awesome that Gerudo is like this? Tears of the Kingdom is doing a lot of work to try to correct this racist history.

Farah also explores more sociopolitical commentaries in “A History of Termina,” where the speaker talks about how those in power are willing to put their interests above the citizens, perpetuating a state of peace despite the need to evacuate as the moon falls. It has an aching sense of self-awareness, as the poem crafts images of poets readying pens to record the disaster and children screaming songs into the night sky in fear.

In this poem, she writes about how players have the ability to reverse time and reset the game. She compares this to how fickle memory is amid hopelessness and how this leads to erasure and complacency throughout history. Though communities may believe people have all the free will to choose how life unfolds, she questions if this is true and how much is in the hands of nature:

Lonely children do not cry wolf / while playing in the forest past nightfall, they ask— / when the moon chooses its end, who will remember us?

 

The Loneliness of Being Unheard

She writes of many speakers burdened by the gravity and seeming inevitability of global strife, how their personhoods are divided because of constant external and internal turmoil. Issues commonly neglected, especially from feminine voices of color, are asserted. Several times throughout the book, Farah makes sure the reader is present with several interludes surrounded by the void of white space on the space, asking:

DO YOU NEED ME TO REPEAT THAT?

[Yes]
[No]

These moments make the reader slow down and remember the urgency of the macro, real-life perspectives Farah brings out of the Zelda universe. The irony of this pause is not lost on fans, knowing how common it is to button-mash past the essential request to listen. As the collection’s description points out, the poems are a desperate exploration of the “reverberations of empire.” She unravels the danger of tyranny, domination, and power in many of the poems, but some of the most hauntingly in these:

We lost this language so long ago. / Silent heroes become quiet civilians / if history never happened again. — “Song of Inverted Time”

Please, before the stone city falls, Goddess forgive us for our hubris. Forgive us for us, with even our wells drowned in history, our names dedicated to myth, dedicated to easier passage. … Let earth rejoin sky. Return and become more. — “In Another Life Link Is a Poet“

The latter is an ode to Skyward Sword, yet it harkens to Farah’s hope for her lands to find themselves again and reobtain agency despite war and genocide. The speakers in Farah’s work often unpack the feelings associated with displacement, whether in personhood or in place.

The collection also brings themes the Zelda games love to explore, such as environmental balance and attentiveness, and paints them in poetry. In “Origin of Korok,” Farah writes about humanity’s lost connection to the Earth and what we could learn from empathizing with the Koroks:

The Children play music to mossy rocks, / listen to the fog to find their way back home. / They are as human as they are earth. … “…How sad for you that trees cannot move.” / Do you grieve its leaves? / Have you tasted anything like it since?

While this theme is present, it goes deeper. Farah notes her specific connection to The Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time because of how they explore the transformation of species, like the Kokiri into Koroks. She also comments on the Zora and Rito in a similar way and discusses how their metamorphoses throughout the series make her think of her experience as a Palestinian-American:

I think of metaphors in which Indigenous Palestinians are the land, we are the olive tree—what are the children of the forest if not the extreme of this motif?

In “100 Years Since the Last Martyr Fell,” the poem spans five pages surrounded by white space, yet uses all caps to accent its distress speaking about The Calamity. Then, on its sixth page, a claustrophobic yet chaotic refrain repeats until the words overlap each other, appearing as a printing error as the words “REMEMBER THEIR NAMES” creates a ghostly mess until it abruptly stops. The poem represents a parallel between the futility of the Era of the Wild’s Blood Moon mechanic and the persistence of Palestinians as murder plagues the population.

Farah leaves many of the poems for the reader to glean lessons and empathize with their unique experiences. However, the author’s notes are required reading in this collection. They contextualize the collection’s heft for those unfamiliar with Zelda lore while showing the series’ fans what aspects are interwoven moments from Farah’s life meshing with Zelda‘s legacy. While the collection is brave in its global commentary, Farah does not forget her identity in these lines as she brings in her personal experience as a feminine individual, a gamer, and a Palestinian-American. In “Moon Chasers Ekphrasis,” she records an experience that sounds straight from a Zelda game, but it is a quiet moment of nostalgia as she watches a video of her and family:

Wildness, they have forgotten. Will a symphony calm your light? Will a symphony stop us from trying? If only, if only; to catch up with the moon is to let it take your breath. To catch up with the moon is to start all over again.

Ultimately, I could die today and live again is a courageous, wise, and powerful mission statement about the importance of seeing the world’s destruction and hope through art. It is a conversation as well as a mural against violence and nihilism, urging those seeking fantasy worlds as a realm of solace to never lose oneself — but to get stronger as a result of the art.

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If you want to keep up with Summer Farah’s work, you can follow her on X. If you want to enjoy more of her poetry, Farah released a zine inspired by the musician, Mitski, called & I was so young when I behaved 25. This is available on ko-fi now.