I Have Brought You A Severed Hand
Ghayath Almadhoun
Action Books, 2025
Ghayath Almadhoun’s I Have Brought You A Severed Hand, as woundedly clocked in translation by Catherine Cobham, changes the present without using time in a verse that pours milk over disappearing and reappearing blood. It is an absolutely beautiful, howling, undisguised, and sighing work, a pilgrimage of homage, an interest earned by yearning in nostalgia’s plastic cocoon, that pays with grey ransacked vividity the debts redacted from receipts of attention. Palestine is here, then there. As is Syria, Sweden, Germany. One can feel America pretending to be here, but love is too flooded a being. Language, too, is here. A light pining for glow. You can go home again, but cannot go housed. Almadhoun writes un- and re-policed in the nonfiction of the surreal, and hesitates so quickly one might go to pieces in a photograph of the lost lost. Saying a work is necessary is currently and old-head American. If I stop here, get this book. If I don’t, do the same.
kingsoftrain 
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