I HAVE BROUGHT YOU A SEVERED HAND by Ghayath Almadhoun

with readings by Ghayath Almadhoun, Mia You, Çağlar Köseoğlu and Maxime Garcia Diaz at 6.30pm

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.

Ghayath Almadhoun 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. Almadhoun currently lives between Berlin and Stockholm. His work has been translated into nearly thirty languages.

Mia You is author of the poetry collections Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2025) and I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016), as well as the chapbooks Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (Nion Editions, 2023) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Cordite Poetry Review, the PEN Poetry Series, and Poetry. She currently teaches Anglophone literature at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute.

Çağlar Köseoğlu is a poet based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His chapbook 34 (2015, Stanza) is both an anti-history of Turkey and an abstract elegy for a group of Kurdish border traders. His poetry collection Nasleep [Aftermath] (2020, het balanseer) takes the Gezi Park protests of 2013 as a point of departure and explores the remnants of that historical moment, oscillating between polyphonic, critical noise and post-revolutionary affects. His poems have appeared in nY, Samplekanon, De Internet Gids, Kunsttijdschrift Vlaanderen, Cabaret WIttgenstein, and Social Text, and are forthcoming in deleuzine. In 2025 he has been the poet in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Currently, he is working on his next poetry collection onze liefde is terroristisch [our love is terroristic], in which he writes for the end of this world. Köseoğlu teaches at Erasmus University College, the Piet Zwart Institute, and the Sandberg Institute.

Maxime Garcia Diaz is a Dutch-Uruguayan poet and most recently the author of the collection Het netwerk moet gebouwd worden / The network must be built (Bezige Bij, 2025), which was published simultaneously in Dutch and English. Her previous book, Het is warm in de hivemind (Bezige Bij, 2022), was the winner of the C. Buddingh’ Prize for the best debut Dutch poetry collection. She is also the winner of the 2019 NK Poetry Slam.