Strangers in Light Coats: Selected Poems, 2014–2020
GHASSAN ZAQTAN, TRANSLATED BY ROBIN MOGER
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born near Bethlehem, Palestinian poet, novelist and editor GHASSAN ZAQTAN has lived in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia. His verse collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, translated by Fady Joudah, was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize for 2013, and he was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in both 2014 and 2016. His name appeared for the first time in 2013 among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
ROBIN MOGER is a translator of Arabic to English based in Barcelona. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. He has translated several novels and prose works into English, including Haytham El Wardany’s The Book of Sleep, Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping, Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat and Ghassan Zaqtan’s Strangers in Light Coats.
INFORMATION
Published by Seagull Books, 2023
ISBN 9781803092386
96 pages, paperback