Action Books, paperback
Translated by Catherine Cobham
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Publisher Marketing: 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 and addressee. 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."
“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
