Ghayath Almadhoun

Author photograph by Sina Opalka

Saturday, March 1
4pm
at David Horvitz’s 7th Ave. Garden

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Language Garden presents the Los Angeles book launch of Palestinian-Syrian-Swedish poet Ghayath Almadhoun’s newest collection, just out from Action Books, I Have Brought You a Severed Hand.

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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.”

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Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet born in Damascus in 1979 and moved to Sweden in 2008. He writes poetry and has been translated into nearly 30 languages. Currently, he lives between Berlin and Stockholm. Almadhoun has published five collections of poetry in Arabic, the latest being "Adrenaline" in 2017 and "I Brought You a Severed Hand" in 2024, both published in Arabic by Almutawassit in Milan.

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The Language Garden Reading Series is programmed by Corina Copp, Sophia Le Fraga, & Joseph Mosconi, with interventions/germinations from David Horvitz.