Behind the Tree Backs

BEHIND THE TREE BACKS investigates a poetics of remembrance, excavating war and displacement through a constellation of animate memories carved out of deep pleasure as well as brutality, the ancient and the institutional, the everyday and the geopolitical.

Translated by Jennifer Hayashida. BEHIND THE TREE BACKS investigates a poetics of remembrance through senses that hover just below and just above the skin. The text excavates war and displacement through a constellation of animate memories carved out of deep pleasure as well as brutality, the ancient and the institutional, the everyday and the geopolitical. The book insists on a poetics that recall through vibrating auratic fields, violence, love, and sexuality; these sensations tremble and cohere in a musical and tightly composed lyric.

Poetry.

Iman Mohammed was born in Baghdad, grew up in Stockholm, and lives in Malmö. She is a graduate of the Swedish writing programs at Biskops Arnö and HDK-Valand. She debuted in 2017 with the chapbook Fermata. BEHIND THE TREE BACKS (Ugly Duckling, 2022) is her first full-length collection of poems, published by Norstedts.

Poet/translator/artist Jennifer Hayashida is the author of A MACHINE WROTE THIS SONG (Gramma Poetry, 2018) and the chapbook Översättaren som arkiv/Arkiv som översätter (Autor). She is the Swedish/English translator of writers including Athena Farrokhzad, Ida Börjel, Kim Hyesoon, and Don Mee Choi. She has received awards from, among others, the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is based in New York and Stockholm.