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.

The poems in Ran Walker's collection use an African-American poetic form called the Kwansaba, which was created in 1995 by Dr. Eugene Redmond. The poems follow a seven-line, seven-words per line pattern with no word more than seven letters (save proper nouns and foreign terms). All language within the form speaks to aspects of African-American history and culture. With these forty-nine poems, each chapter of forty-nine lines, Walker offers profound commentary on a wide variety of topics ranging from interrogations of celebrity culture to issues that speak directly to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The poet, the unknown being… a loony, a dreamer, a hermit. The poet writes poetry… but really, what is poetry? Arts, politics, mere amusement?

This little book is an insight into the mindset of someone who just can’t help but to be a poet. It is a manifesto for the freedom of thought and expression, an essential source of motivation and inspiration for readers and writers alike.

Anisur Rahman (b.1978) made his poetic debut in 2003. As a journalist, translator and playwright he has further contemplated the poetic mind. Born in Bangladesh, he writes in both Bengali and English, but nowadays lives exiled in Sweden.

18 Brum’Hair est un recueil de poèmes écrits à quatre mains par Martin Desinde et Phœbe Hadjimarkos-Clarke au rythme du calendrier révolutionnaire. Si son titre fait référence—non sans un humour capillotracté—au coup d’État de Louis Bonaparte et au livre de Karl Marx traitant du dit-sujet, les auteur·ice·s écrivent ici en ping-pong sur notre temps présent et divaguent autour de sujets divers tels que l’état du monde, la vie urbaine, les drogues et l’alcool, la séduction, la sexualité, l’amour, le chagrin, l’amitié, la révolution... Ces 18 poèmes sont accompagnés de 12 allégories dessinées par Flore Chemin.
Un 18 brumaire littéraire, sans doute plus proche de la farce que de la tragédie.

Martin Desinde est auteur, éditeur et graphiste installé à Paris. Son travail fait dialoguer poésie et idéologie au travers de multiples formes: textes, objets éditoriaux, ready-mades, performances... Il fonde en 2017 la maison d'édition Dépense Défensive avec l’artiste Louis Somveille.

Phœbe Hadjimarkos-Clarke écrit des romans et des poésiesoù elle explore la vie organique et sentimentale au temps du capitalisme tardif. Elle vit dans de grandes villes et de petits villages.

Flore Chemin vit et travaille entre Paris et la Corrèze, sa pratique s’articule autour de la peinture, l’édition et l’installation. Elle y cultive une esthétique de l’à peu près qui répond à divers principes: faire d’abord / comprendre après, rester floue.s pour résister sous cape, inviter le monstre et les mauvaises herbes au cœur du jardin.

OEI #80-81 is not an anthological publication, and has no representative ambition. It is a montage-based publication trying, in as material a way as possible, to register, prolong, transform and reflect upon energies from the work of Portuguese artist Ernesto de Sousa and his fellows (Alberto Carneiro, Túlia Saldanha, Álvaro Lapa, Fernando Calhau, Lourdes Castro, Ana Vieira, Ana Hatherly, E.M. de Melo e Castro, António Barros...).

Ernesto de Sousa and his fellows defined themselves as aesthetic operators and worked as filmmakers, photographers, curators, critics, writers, folk art researchers, multimedia artists... OEI #80-81 also gathers texts on magazines such as Poesia Experimental, Operação, Nova, A Urtiga, and Alternativa; and works by artists from younger generations such as Isabel Carvalho, Paulo Mendes and Mariana Silva, in dialogue with that of de Sousa.