Synopsis
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 six 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 Authors
Ghassan Zaqtan is a Palestinian poet, novelist, and editor. Born in Bethlehem, he has lived in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Tunisia.
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English based in Barcelona. 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.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.