Title: I Have Brought You a Severed Hand
Author: Ghayath Almadhoun
Translation: Catherine Cobham
Publisher: Divided Publishing, 2025
I read Ghayath Almadhoun’s I Have Brought You a Severed Hand, translated by Catherine Cobham, and found that it is not merely a collection of poems—it is a sustained detonation that sometimes hurts. Composed across years of exile and the upheaval of his homeland, this book resists the conventions of witness literature. The verse does not ask for empathy; it demands your attention, and sometimes your complicity.
Almadhoun operates at the intersection of poetry and political indictment. His verses are laced with surreal inversions, satire, and recurring motifs of fragmentation: bodies, nations, and languages. He refuses coherence where coherence would be dishonest. The poet brings Syria, Europe, the refugee camp, and the colonial museum into a shared poetic space, but this is no museum of memory—it is a place of active confrontation.
The collection is animated by what could be described as a poetry of rupture. The language is volatile, fluid, and constantly on the brink of breaking itself apart. Almadhoun’s metaphors are often shocking by design: poems where grilled fish “tastes like Syrians,” or where Stockholm is lovingly described as “a city for Neanderthals.” He satirizes everything, including himself, European liberalism, and even the act of writing poetry after catastrophe.
Yet the emotional and rhetorical volume of the book, while often electrifying, occasionally tips into excess. Some poems stretch metaphor to the point of fatigue; others shout so insistently that the reader may feel distanced rather than drawn in. There is a kind of theatricality and emotive spectacle—justified, perhaps, by trauma—that at times overshadows the finer textures of thought. Almadhoun’s poetic mode is accumulation, but its risk is saturation. Reading, I longed for a pause, a breath, a moment of understated clarity.
That said, this overload is also a formal strategy. The density of the work—its recursive footnotes, its surging imagery, its refusal of closure—is part of its indictment. The reader is not allowed the luxury of detachment. Catherine Cobham’s translation meets this challenge admirably. Her English is taut, inventive, and responsive to Almadhoun’s tonal instability. She preserves not only meaning, but cadence—and crucially, indignation.
I Have Brought You a Severed Hand is a necessary book. It is contradictory, furious, and unrelenting. It mourns without elegy, indicts without absolution. If at times it screams too loudly, it is because it speaks from a place where silence has long been weaponized. Almadhoun does not offer poetry as balm; he offers it as a severed hand—both a gift and a wound.
