Divided Publishing

I have brought you a severed hand

£ 11.99
Buy in Europe UK Australia
£ 11.99
Buy in Europe UK Australia

I have brought you a severed handGhayath Almadhountrans. Catherine Cobham

£ 11.99

I have brought you a severed hand

Ghayath Almadhoun

trans. Catherine Cobham

Fluid and unselfconscious, Ghayath Almadhoun writes love poems in the shape of nightmares: I have brought you a severed hand is a surreal mix of absurd humour, heteroerotic lust and dead seriousness. Caught between two exiles, the one inherited from his Palestinian father and the one he chose and lives, Almadhoun attempts to explain water and tame hope.

  • 978-1-7398431-2-0
  • 21.6 x 13.9 cm
  • 144 pp.
  • Paperback
  • 24 March 2025

About the author

Ghayath Almadhoun (born 1979, Damascus) is a Syrian-Palestinian poet who moved to Sweden in 2008. He has published five collections of poetry in Arabic, the latest being Adrenalin (Almutawassit, 2017) and I have brought you a severed hand (Almutawassit, 2024). In 2017, Adrenalin was translated into English by Catherine Cobham and published by Action Books. In 2023, Almadhoun curated, edited and translated the poetry anthology Kontinentaldrift: Das Arabische Europa (Verlag Das Wunderhorn and Haus für Poesie), which includes thirty-one Arabic poets living in Europe. The English translation of I have brought you a severed hand is published simultaneously by Divided in the UK and Europe and by Action Books in the USA. Almadhoun currently lives between Berlin and Stockholm. His work has been translated into nearly thirty languages.

Photo: Sina Opalka

About the translator

Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and was head of the department of Arabic and Persian from 2011 until 2021. She has translated the work of a number of Arab writers, including poetry by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghayath Almadhoun, Tammam Hunaidy and Nouri al-Jarrah, and novels and short stories by Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, Fuad al-Takarli and Jamal Saeed. She has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Endorsements (3)

This book never misses the defiant beat of an exile’s haunted footing across wars, seas and memory. Almadhoun turns the genocidal logic of colonialism upside down, emptying out the crumbs of humanity and civilisation.

Don Mee Choi

Almadhoun uses every possible means of silence to make the total devastation palpable.

Alfred Schaffer

Many poets attempt to traverse the gulf between the experience of tragedy and the ability to relay its magnitude to anyone else. But few living have done it with such flourish, such sustained passion and formal precision as Ghayath Almadhoun.

Kaveh Akbar

Press (4)

Book of the Week: Ghayath Almadhoun, I have brought you a severed handPalFestPalestine Festival of Literature24/07/2025
Ghayath Almadhoun: Europe, we love your art and hate your bombsDritan KiçiThe Brussels Review24/05/2025
On Ghayath Almadhoun’s ‘I have brought you a severed hand’Toby ÜpsonThe Yellow Paper07/05/2025
Ghayath Almadhoun: Writing is my real homelandDimitra DidangelouThe Brussels Review10/10/2024

Holy Smoke

£ 11.99
Buy in Europe UK Australia
£ 11.99
Buy in Europe UK Australia

Holy SmokeFanny Howe

£ 11.99

Holy Smoke

Fanny Howe

At once evocative and subtly incisive Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time.

Adam Phillips

A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life.

Navid Sinaki

Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I'll never know . . . But now that I have a name, I know I must write . . . I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad.

Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century.

Illustrated by Colleen McCallion

  • 978-1-0684395-1-3
  • 21.6 x 13.9 cm
  • 116 pp.
  • Paperback
  • 01 December 2025

About the author

Fanny Howe was born on 15 October 1940 in Buffalo, New York. She was professor emerita in literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of more than fifty books of poetry and prose. Howe taught literature and writing throughout her life and mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical thinking. She died on 8 July 2025 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Endorsements (3)

Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty.

The New Yorker

Poet of unsettled dreams.

The New York Times

Reading her fiction feels something like facing a patch of wilderness—startling, beautiful, yet terrifyingly mysterious.

BOMB Magazine

Press (4)

Keeping the Soul Fresh: Fanny Howe's Holy SmokeGeorgia PuiattiTo Be Magazine09/12/2025
Twenty Questions with Fanny HoweFanny HoweThe TLS04/12/2025
Fanny Howe’s Holy Smoke Henry BroomeBOMB Magazine, Fall 202509/2025
Poetry: Fanny Howe reads from her novel "Holy Smoke", just out from Fiction CollectiveSusan HowePacifica Radio Archives15/07/1979