Strangers in Light Coats

Selected Poems, 2014–2020
Translated by Robin Moger
₹499.00 $21 £16.99

A highly anticipated edition of Zaqtan’s work from 2014 to 2020, all in English for the first time.

Ghassan Zaqtan is not only one of the most significant Palestinian poets at work today, but one of the most important poets writing in Arabic. Since the publication of his first collection in 1980, Zaqtan’s presence as a poet has evolved with the same branching and cumulative complexity as his poems—an invisible system of roots insistently pushing through the impacted soil of political and national narratives.

Strangers in Light Coats is the third collection of Zaqtan’s poetry to appear in English. It brings together poems written between 2014 and 2020 drawn from four volumes of poetry. Catching and holding the smallest particles of observation and experience in their gravity, the poems sprout and grow as though compelled, a trance of process in which fable, myth, and elegy take form only to fall apart and reconfigure, each line picked apart by the next and brought into the new body.

 

Ghassan Zaqtan’s Strangers in Light Coats is a powerful collection of poems about memory, loss, and the struggles of Palestinians in exile.—Ramona Wadi, The Newarab. Read the full feature here.

Beyond recurring motifs, figures, and dialogues that create a consistent narrative thread, Zaqtan’s poetry embodies a unifying and deeply Palestinian sense of resilience: “At night, while they sleep, / I write blind poems / and hold their hands / and we push on in the dark.”—Khalid Lyamlahy, University of Chicago, World Literature Today. Read the full feature here.

ISBN: 9781803092386
Pages: 96
Publication Year: November 2023
Format: Paperback
Size: 5”x 8”
Rights: UCP
Category: Poetry
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