
the specimen's apology - $15.00 (Sibling Rivalry Press, 1/11/2019)
Praise for the specimen's apology:
"Searing away binaries, demolishing the calcified partitions between halves—this is the project George Abraham’s the specimen’s apology. Boy/man, man/woman, history/present, conflict/occupation, English/Arabic, poetry/visual art—the gulf between each is breached, shrunk, erased, widened, warped. “I am always translating,” Abraham tells us in one poem—and it is the wild desperate yearning of the translator, working in vain to achieve perfect fidelity to a source, that powers these poems: 'if desire is, / as my language translates, a moon, / let this body be the satellite.'"
- Kaveh Akbar (author of Calling A Wolf A Wolf)
"From the first, devastating poem (“i touch myself & do not leak gold”), George Abraham’s poems bristle with alchemy, a narrative of love, history, family, and Palestine that pulses with longing. “You cannot know the way you split galaxies/with a single breath,” he says, a prophecy that unfolds throughout the collection, where the speaker reclaims himself, his grief and—yes—his land over and over. Juxtaposed with Leila Abdelrazaq’s startlingly evocative artwork, the specimen’s apology is a fearless, riveting excavation of self and other."
- Hala Alyan (author of The Twenty-Ninth Year and Salt Houses, two-time winner of the Arab American Book Award)
"In the specimen's apology George Abraham writes with a sharp elegance about lineage, about inheritance, about what gets passed down and what doesn't. What's erased. What's obscured. What's locked away. I get the sense of Rubik Cube-ing, searching for the right sequence of words or images or structures to make sense of absence, and in doing so he makes a beautiful, furious and crackling new kind of sense. His writing smacks my feelings right across the face."
- Tommy Pico (author of Junk and Nature Poem, winner of the American Book Award)