Abraham George — The Specimen’s Apology

Description

Sibling Rivalry Press, LLC, paperback

Publication Date: January 11, 2019

Publisher Marketing: 

“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

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