In A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know, Syrian Kurdish poet Golan Haji writes across the fractured landscapes of exile, war, memory and displacement.

Translated collaboratively by Haji and Stephen Watts, this collection gathers poems in which bodies, landscapes and language are continually transformed by violence and absence. Hospitals, cemeteries, abandoned villages, birds and rivers recur throughout, their imagery moving between the intimate and the catastrophic. The poems resist straightforward testimony, approaching experiences of loss through surreal, often startling associations.

Haji's language is restless and elliptical, shifting between lyric fragments, extended sequences and prose poetry. In poems such as 'Bubble' and 'The Jump', survival becomes something unstable, while the familiar boundaries between self and other, memory and invention, presence and disappearance begin to dissolve. There is considerable attention to what language cannot adequately contain, and to the persistence of beauty within landscapes marked by destruction. A compelling collection concerned as much with the limits of representation as with the experiences it attempts to preserve.

Edition/Condition: A Midsummer Night's Press, 2017. First edition paperback. Good condition, with light surface wear to the covers. Interior pages appear clean and unmarked.