Khaleed, Jazra: The Light That Burns Us

World Poetry Books, paperback

Publication Date: October 10, 2024

Translated by: Peter Constantine, Viktoras Iliopoulos, Sarah McCann, Jason Rigas, Max Ritvo, Angelos Sakkis, Josephine Simple, Brian Sneeden, & Karen Van Dyck

Publisher Marketing: The English-language debut of one of Greece's most radical poetic voices, now in an expanded edition. Jazra Khaleed's poetry is electrifying, an unapologetic indictment of the wrongs faced by immigrants, by a rudderless young European generation, by leftist activists in a Greece and a Europe blighted by neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization. Born in Chechnya in 1979, Khaleed is a poet who seems very Greek and not Greek at all; his language is sharp, refined, and controlled, with elegant rhythms and contemporary street speech that often has an undertow of a sophisticated language with moments of Byzantine and New Testament Greek. In his poetry there is a power, erudition, and control that Greek readers have trouble equating with a man named Jazra. The poems are always political, vehement, written at times from a very personal perspective, and at others from that of an objective outsider. It is a poetry that tears the untroubled reader back to a reality that may well be dangerous.