Adrenalin

Candice Wuehle’s Death Industrial Complex is a meditation on the cultural obsession with the bodies of dead women and an occult invocation of the artist Francesca Woodman. Like Woodman’s photographs with their long exposures and blurred lenses, this book is haunted and haunting, hazy yet devastatingly precise. These are poems as possessions, gothic ekphrases, dialogues with the dead, biography and anti-biography, a stunning act of “cryptobeauty.”

A landmark feminist poet and critic in her native South Korea, Kim Hyesoon’s surreal, dagger-sharp poetry has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere in the past ten years, her works translated to Chinese, Swedish, English, French, German, Dutch, and beyond. In A Drink of Red Mirror, Kim Hyesoon raises a glass to the reader in the form of a series of riddles, poems conjuring the you inside the me, the night inside the day, the outside inside the inside, the ocean inside the tear. Kim’s radical, paradoxical intimacies entail sites of pain as well as wonder, opening onto impossible—which is to say, visionary—vistas. Again and again, in these poems as across her career, Kim unlocks a horizon inside the vanishing point.

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.

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

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

Ghayath Almadhoun (born 1979, Damascus) is a Syrian-Palestinian poet who moved to Sweden in 2008. He has published five collections of poetry in Arabic, the latest being Adrenalin (Almutawassit, 2017) and I have brought you a severed hand (Almutawassit, 2024). In 2017, Adrenalin was translated into English by Catherine Cobham and published by Action Books. In 2023, Almadhoun curated, edited and translated the poetry anthology Kontinentaldrift: Das Arabische Europa (Verlag Das Wunderhorn and Haus für Poesie), which includes thirty-one Arabic poets living in Europe. The English translation of I have brought you a severed hand is published simultaneously by Divided in the UK and Europe and by Action Books in the USA. Almadhoun currently lives between Berlin and Stockholm. His work has been translated into nearly thirty languages.

Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and was head of the department of Arabic and Persian from 2011 until 2021. She has translated the work of a number of Arab writers, including poetry by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghayath Almadhoun, Tammam Hunaidy and Nouri al-Jarrah, and novels and short stories by Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, Fuad al-Takarli and Jamal Saeed. She has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

'In de poëzie kunnen twee verschillende werelden elkaar ontmoeten, door gedichten kunnen we zonder ID denkbeeldige grenzen overschrijden en in dezelfde denkbeeldige ruimte verblijven. Maar is die ruimte wel dezelfde? Kunnen we losbreken uit onze rollen van slachtoffer en medeplichtige? Kunnen gedichten ons leren ons te identificeren met ongevoelde pijn? Wat spreekt er uit onze ontmoeting op papier?' - Anne Vegter

'Een dichter moet egoïstisch zijn, moet een eenzame wolf zijn, maar soms ontmoeten eenzame wolven elkaar in de wouden en jagen ze samen. Twee dichters, één boek: niet noodzakelijkerwijs om iets nieuws te bouwen, maar om de muren af te breken die ons tegenhouden wanneer we naar de andere oever willen oversteken. De Steen van Rosetta, die ervoor zorgt dat we het ongelezene lezen.' - Ghayath Almadhoun

Ghayath Almadhoun (1979) werd geboren in het Palestijnse vluchtelingenkamp Yarmouk in Damascus als zoon van een Palestijnse vader en een Syrische moeder. Hij studeerde Arabische literatuur aan de Universiteit van Damascus en werkte als cultureel journalist. Sinds 2008 woont hij in Stockholm. In Nederland verscheen in 2014 zijn lovend besproken dichtbundel 'Weg van Damascus'. Anne Vegter woont en werkt in Rotterdam. Van haar hand verschenen onder andere de verhalenbundels 'Ongekuiste versies' en 'Harries hoofdingang' en de dichtbundels 'Aandelen en obligaties', 'Spamfighter' en 'Eiland berg gletsjer'. Haar werk werd meermaals bekroond. De afgelopen vier jaar was ze Dichter des Vaderlands. De gedichten van Ghayath Almadhoun zijn uit het Arabisch vertaald door Djûke Poppinga.

Work/Anti-work issue with writing by Nat Raha /. lisa minerva luxx /Ghayath Almadhoun, trans. Catherine Cobham / Jacqui Germain / Jazra Khaleed, trans. Peter Constantine / Finn Finneran / Cait O’Kane / Rebecca Kosick / Lara Durback Skye /Lotta Thießen / William Rowe / Danny Hayward / Rona Lorimer / Zoe Beloff / Jike Ayou, trans. Yě Yě / Miguel de Vallester, trans. Erasmo Pantoja / Lucas Martínez / ko ko thett / Hung Q. Tu / Raymond de Borja / etaïnn zwer, trans. Ilan A.L.S. Erikson Weisbrod / Annie Raab on Taylor Portela / Rachael Guynn Wilson on Lyn Hejinian / Will Rowe on Danny Hayward / Chloe Watlington on Joshua Clover. 

A Mouth Holds Many Things collects hybrid-literary works from 36 women and nonbinary BIPOC writer-artists. Spanning experimental poetry and prose, image-text, collage, performance text, AI-generated writing, and more, this ground-breaking full-color print volume illuminates and expands the interstitial spaces where text blends, blurs, and morphs with visual and other media.

At the restless heart of this collection is a challenge to some fundamental questions: What is reading? What is writing? Lifting language beyond the domain of the letter, the works collected here present language in other forms: visual, embodied, sonic, asemic, tactile. Language, after all, is multi-textu(r)al, interwoven, punctured, fragmented, grafted, possessing power to construct and deconstruct, fed into by many rivers of experience: marginalizations and migrations, diasporas and displacements, invisibilities and hyper-visibilities.

A project of the Portland-based literary-social art project, De-Canon, which creates unique spaces and experiments to center works by writers of color, this collection is edited by Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan.

A Mouth Holds Many Things was, in the short stories/poetry/anthologies category, the winner of a 2024 PubWest Book Design Award.

Full list of contributors

Stephanie Adams-Santos, Kimberly Alidio, Samiya Bashir, Aya Bram, Victoria Chang, Jennifer S. Cheng, Gabrielle Civil, desveladas (Macarena Hernández, Sheila Maldonado, Nelly Rosario), Carolina Ebeid, Nadia Haji Omar, Christine Shan Shan Hou, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Vi Khi Nao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Monica Ong, Shin Yu Pai, Jenne Hsien Patrick, Jennifer Perrine, Alley Pezanoski-Browne, Kelly Puig, Ayesha Raees, Jhani Randhawa, Paisley Rekdal, Daisuke Shen, Sasha Stiles, Sandy Tanaka, Arianne True, Addie Tsai, Vauhini Vara, Divya Victor, Anna Martine Whitehead, Kathy Wu

A fullness of the erotic that pervades the entirety of the book to its edges, where a continual corruption of our often unexpressed desires overflows into forms both lyrical and traditional. "Butterflies Come Out At Night" continuously asks where the "you" stands, and if desire can empower one to reach a fullness of self. No othering, but flowing seamless from source to rapid source. The book explores this encompassing and embracing body of care and power through poetry, collage, enchantments, and spells and keeps an aura that constantly shifts where the erotic nature of both writer and reader bloom through out the reading.

Alice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.

Picture a pencil curved, implausibly, parabolically. An implement bending back on itself (core straining) so as to be drawing the surest line, even as its eraser-end is simultaneously rubbing that graphite out. What remains almost never was: mark as memorial to foreclosure. Examined from a certain angle, the un-line flickers in and out of thereness. On registration, it lives, it goes forth. Sub rosa, it knows never to clear its throat. It has learnt to calibrate its signature; it can evade infra-red. Propelling itself through the narrowest channels, it proceeds with resolve, flayingly. Mattar’s And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring is taut as writing can be. The tone she makes sound is singular and desperately (gloriously) intent.
- Sarah Hayden

Piercing and lucid in its exposition of atmospheric violence and total erasure, Mira Mattar gets to the grain of how the languages of selfhood, mediated but also inhibited by the force of the ‘un-universal’, become complicit in forming the sovereign imperative to self-determination, ‘oh arrogant ambition / to transform / you & keep myself / plumed’, through the reproduction of a ‘contested field / of meaning’, one both marked by the lure and ruse of psychic stability as the real fantasy of occupation, and immanent to concrete, unknown modes of personal resistance and collective recovery thread like a ‘rope / in a knot in a line / of knots’, an inherited ‘excess of memory / mostly portal.’ Mattar carefully gleans in its undecidability, given over to moments of precarious decision without ties or duplicity.
- James Goodwin

One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people. 

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing. 
— Max Porter

A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the midsts of unspeakable violence.

Translated from the Arabic by the poet with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher