top of page
'I Have Brought You a Severed Hand'
The latest poetry collection by Ghayath Almadhoun, in an English translation by Catherine Cobham, published by Action Books in the USA and by Divided Publishing in London and Brussels.
In a phalanx of notes and footnotes, I Have Brought You a Severed Hand destabilizes the very hierarchies of the page, and in so doing transgresses the borders of the poem, the nation, the body, and even that zone between speaker andaddressee. Written over the years 2017 to 2023, the poet takes us to Palestine, Syria, Germany and Sweden, reasserting the stakes for those unable to leave their states of imprisonment while proposing that hope may be inseparable from the absurdity of violence. He writes: “You say that I survived the war. No, my dear, nobody survives wars. It’s only that I didn’t die. I just stayed alive.”
(Action Books)
Fluid and unselfconscious, Ghayath Almadhoun writes love poems in the shape of nightmares: I have brought you a severed hand is a surreal mix of absurd humour, heteroerotic lust and dead seriousness. Caught between two exiles, the one inherited from his Palestinian father and the one he chose and lives, Almadhoun attempts to explain water and tame hope
(Divided Publishing)
This book never misses the defiant beat of an exile’s haunted footing across wars, seas and memory. Almadhoun turns the genocidal logic of colonialism upside down, emptying out the crumbs of humanity and civilisation.
— Don Mee Choi
“Ghayath Almadhoun has found a lyrical language that is appropriate to the Syrian civil war. He is the great poet of a great catastrophe.”
—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“For a murdered person there is no resurrection except in poetry; for a murdered poem, there is no resurrection except in reading.”
—Bookforum
“Almadhoun subverts lyricism and turns metaphor on its head to expose, transform, self-indict, confront.”
—Poetry Foundation
“Formally experimentally and emotionally explosive.”
—Asymptote
“Almadhoun caught me with his first line.”
—Jenny Holzer
Almadhoun uses every possible means of silence to make the total devastation palpable.
— Alfred Schaffer
Many poets attempt to traverse the gulf between the experience of tragedy and the ability to relay its magnitude to anyone else. But few living have done it with such flourish, such sustained passion and formal precision as Ghayath Almadhoun.
— Kaveh Akbar
bottom of page