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The Specimen's Apology

“Searing away binaries, demolishing the calcified partitions between halves — this is George Abraham’s the specimen’s apology. Boy/man, man/woman, history/present, conflict/occupation, English/Arabic, poetry/visual art — the gulf between each is breached, shrunk, erased, widened, warped. ‘I am always translating,’ Abraham tells us in one poem — and it is the wild desperate yearning of the translator, working in vain to achieve perfect fidelity to a source, that powers these poems: ‘if desire is, / as my language translates, a moon, / let this body be the satellite.’” —Kaveh Akbar

“From the first, devastating poem (‘i touch myself & do not leak gold’), George Abraham’s poems bristle with alchemy, a narrative of love, history, family, and Palestine that pulses with longing. ‘You cannot know the way you split galaxies/with a single breath,’ he says, a prophecy that unfolds throughout the collection, where the speaker reclaims himself, his grief and — yes — his land, over and over. Juxtaposed with Leila Abdelrazaq’s startlingly evocative artwork, the specimen’s apology is a fearless, riveting excavation of self and other.” —Hala Alyan

“In the specimen’s apology George Abraham writes with a sharp elegance about lineage, about inheritance, about what gets passed down, and what doesn’t. What’s erased. What’s obscured. What’s locked away. I get the sense of Rubik’s Cube-ing, searching for the right sequence of words or images or structures to make sense of absence, and in doing so, he makes a beautiful, furious, and crackling new kind of sense. His writing smacks my feelings right across the face.” —Tommy Pico

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781943977925
  • Genres
  • poetry, lgbt
  • Release date
  • 2019