Khar-Eddine, Mohammed: Scorpionic Sun

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Scorpionic SunbyMohammed Khar-Eddine.Translated by Conor Bracken(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, paperback)

Publication Date: September 10, 2019

Publisher Marketing:Poetry. “Mohammed Khar-Eddine’s poems speak from 1969 to the present with urgency, through an explosively anachronistic act of translation by Conor Bracken. As Khar-Eddine writes in ‘Black Nausea,’ the poems ‘offer to the future this weird / fruit / which speaks in the mouths / of the thousands of innocents dead / in our black blood.’ The distortive energies of Khar-Eddine’s ‘linguistic guerilla war’ agitate for a politically convulsive poetry that dares to be strange, spastic and abjectly sublime. This is a return of a political surrealism when its convulsive bloom is most needed.”Johannes Gransson

“No, decolonizing is not a metaphor, but it is a proposal emerging from the place where land and consciousness meet. To get closer to that place Khar-Eddine’s SCORPIONIC SUN resists any nation stateor any readerwho would take up land or consciousness, song or bodies as mere instruments. Wisely, then, Conor Bracken’s translation doesn’t so much use as it delivers English into the brutal ongoingness of what Teresa Villa-Ignacio has called Khar-Eddine’s ‘seismic line.’ Thus thoroughly shaken and gone we can find one another ‘by a necessary association with events to come.'”Farid Matuk