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)
Al Youm - for Yesterday & her inherited traumas - $15.00
"George Abraham's hefty chapbook, al youm, is an examination of what is inherited, particularly in the face of Zionism when the body is Palestinian, and wildly alive. It is a chapbook composed with form as much as it is with the erasure of form—form as poetics, form as memory, form as function, form as home. Redaction, too, is a wound that bleeds, as when Zionist revision forces a reissuing of meaning, an eschewing of Palestine, a violence bristling confessional into agonized song. But George is more than the black bars that keep him. His is a voice scarred but inviolate, able to move in the preternatural way survivors must carry themselves on. He travels forward and backward in his memories with a rage that starts to bloom into something new and haloed."
- Natalie Eilbert, from al youm introduction