The Town I Never Told You about by Ghassan Zaqtan and translated by Robin Moger

This is poetry from Palestine.

The Town I Never Told You about by Ghassan Zaqtan translated by Robin Moger is published by Seagull Books. This is a Book originally written in Arabic. This was published in 2026.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781803096063E12.

The Town I Never Told You about, by Ghassan Zaqtan and translated by Robin Moger from Arabic, brings Arabic-language poetry from Palestine into English through Zaqtan’s untold town, withheld testimony, and Palestinian place as something both remembered and protected from speech. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for town, secrecy, memory, and the ethical pressure around what a poet can or cannot tell, not as a fixed lesson about Palestine. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. The Town I Never Told You about belongs in the translated poetry library because it belongs as a Palestinian meditation on place, silence, and the dignity of withheld narration.

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.