Ahmad Almallah’s third poetry collection considers the impossible task of being a Palestinian in the world today.
When genocide is the question, can the answer be anything but wrong? In Wrong Winds, written during the first months of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Palestinian-American poet Ahmad Almallah converses with the screams echoing throughout the West. Traversing European cities, Almallah encounters the impossibility of being a Palestinian, left alone in a world full of sympathizers and enemies. Through a continuous unsettling of words and places, considering the broken voices of Western poetry (Eliot, Lorca, Celan among others), the poems in Wrong Winds discover the world again and form an impossible dialogue with the dead and dying.
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.
In a phalanx of notes and footnotes, written over the years 2017 to 2023, Almadhoun 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.”
Ahmad Almallah grew up in Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia. His newest poetry collection, Wrong Winds, is out with Fonograf Editions (2025). His other collections include Border Wisdom (Winter Editions, 2023) and Bitter English (Chicago, 2019). He is an artist in residence in English and Creative Writing at UPenn. His poems appeared in Poetry, SAND, APR, MQR, Icarus among others. Some of his honors include: a fellowship and residency at Millay Arts, the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize and the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship.
Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet born in Damascus in 1979 and moved to Sweden in 2008. Almadhoun has published five volumes of poetry in Arabic and his poetry has been translated into nearly 30 languages. He has created several poetry films, collaborated extensively with artists and scholars, and curated numerous events, readings, and literary anthologies. Adrenalin, translated by Catherine Cobham, came out with Action Books in 2017, and in February 2025, I Have Brought You a Severed Hand will be published simultaneously in English translation by Action Books in the U.S. and Divided Publishing in London and Brussels. Almadhoun currently divides his time between Berlin and Stockholm.