Everything stays inside night, a face that remains the same during the day undergoes several shifts in darkness, it is about different passages, at some point face and river meet near the underworld, rippling and crickets, specific meals, a hand instructing in how to make kobe, you place the rice in your palm and shape it like a bowl, where you put the shredded meat, glistening little legs dangle and wait for a ride to school, spiders climb over your head, body falls through a building creates a tingling sensation in the stomach and your eyebrows are alternately raised and lowered, cold sand after summer, pupils beneath thin eyelids move as if possessed, Mesopotamian sculptures float in the water, they suddenly rise and begin to walk toward land, lips sometimes smile in deep sleep, the body is slack yet the face possesses thousands of nerves wanting to speak to it all.
Behind the Tree Backs
Iman Mohammed
Translated by Jennifer Hayashida
March 2022
I initially am rendered mute. I do not know what to say. Read it.
Anna Hallberg
Behind the Tree Backs investigates a poetics of remembrance through senses that hover just below and just above the skin. The text excavates war and displacement through a constellation of animate memories carved out of deep pleasure as well as brutality, the ancient and the institutional, the everyday and the geopolitical. The book insists on a poetics that recall through vibrating auratic fields, violence, love, and sexuality; these sensations tremble and cohere in a musical and tightly composed lyric.
About the Author
Iman Mohammed was born in Baghdad, grew up in Stockholm, and lives in Malmö. She is a graduate of the Swedish writing programs at Biskops Arnö and HDK-Valand. She debuted in 2017 with the chapbook Fermata. Behind the Tree Backs is her first full-length collection of poems, published by Norstedts.
Praise
I initially am rendered mute. I do not know what to say. Read it. Swallow its lines as you would smooth lozenges and feel how they explode in your body: hard, soft, awful, gorgeous, rare, mundane, enormous, ugly, exact, verdant, human… It is a tightly woven writing that ventures deep down into grammar and therefore torques cognition from within… But I believe that the poems manage to contain enormous chaos by simply moving in multiple directions at the same time. The readerly experience is that they stand still, but in fact they are sustained by diametrical antagonisms.
Anna Hallberg, Dagens Nyheter
The perspective is zoomed-in—in some poems down to the atomic—and distorted. The world appears vaguely archaic among the book’s marble statues, roses, and emerald-green summers. At the same time, the poems’ quick, worried movements appear hyper-modern. In one passage, red water streams up and down stairs so as to evoke a GIF-animation, another presents a rapid distillation of sleeping thoughts.
Mikaela Blomqvist, Aftonbladet
About the Translator
Poet/translator/artist Jennifer Hayashida is the author of A Machine Wrote this Song (Gramma Poetry/Black Ocean) and the chapbook Översättaren som arkiv/Arkiv som översätter (Autor). She is the Swedish/English translator of writers including Athena Farrokhzad, Ida Börjel, Kim Hyesoon, and Don Mee Choi. She has received awards from, among others, the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is based in New York and Stockholm.
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-90-9
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 144 pp, 5.6875 x 7.125 in
Publication Date: March 15 2022
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)