Adrenalin
poetry by Ghayath Almadhoun, translated by Catherine Cobham
Action Books, 2017
my heart becomes a wooden scarecrow to chase away Hitchcock’s birds
– {from} The Capital
In a voice of recent distance, Ghayath Almadhoun, in the work Adrenalin, as translated by Catherine Cobham, is able to distill a ceaseless thing with a billowing anxiety of verse underscored by dry nostalgias and headless histories that are revealed, in the final section Black Milk, as informers to the funereal travelogue of the unsalted body. This is not a wake, this is war, this is the honoring of the soft bullet in the ongoing inquiry of the stray man. This is not the face, done up, that one has to remember to recognize but is instead the zombie childhood our memory forgets repeating. The dead (here) are scene stealers apologizing to us for disappearing and the living (there) bless their own partlessness and pass, forgiven, through the vapor. As beauty is necessary for indictment, there is beauty here as a landscape confessing to geography.
How often we make our visionaries into brief voyeurs. Almadhoun’s is a staying text, and is touched with a witness I keep seeing.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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book is here:
http://actionbooks.org/ghayath-almadhoun-adrenalin/
ISACOUSTIC* 
Reblogged this on kingsoftrain.
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