Baghdad, Adieu by Salah Al Hamdani and translated by Sonia Alland

This is poetry from Iraq.

Baghdad, Adieu by Salah Al Hamdani translated by Sonia Alland is published by Seagull Books. This is a Book originally written in Arabic. This was published in 2019.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780857425447E12.

Baghdad, Adieu, by Salah Al Hamdani, is a Arabic poetry collection from Iraq, translated by Sonia Alland, published by Seagull Books in 2019. It is a farewell book in the deepest sense, carrying Iraq not as abstraction but as city, wound, address, and impossible beloved. Rather than forcing the poems into a clean thesis, I would let the book remain somewhat unruly. Translation is useful exactly there, where the English line carries both arrival and residue. What matters is the reader’s permission to sit with that residue until feeling arrives before explanation. That small hesitation matters, because poetry often begins where summary stops being enough.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.