BOOK LAUNCH: Fargo Nissim Tbakhi | Mantra Mukim

The world has always been broken, that's why we need poets.

Please join us at the Palestine Museum Scotland to celebrate the launch of two books born out of two disasters; the genocide and destruction of Gaza and the 1984 Bhopal gas explosion in India.  Our two poets are Fargo Nissim Tbakhi and Mantra Mukim, and they will be hosted by poet and activist-scholar, Nat Raha.

FARGO NISSIM TBAKHI is a queer Palestinian performance artist focusing on Palestinian lived experiences and winner of the Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Prize. 

Moving through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi's debut poetry collection, Terror Counter, attempts to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood. The voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life.

TERROR COUNTER asks: where and how might a Palestinian subject escape the public consumption of American letters? And, ultimately, how can we continue to love each other amidst the endless terror of the colonial world?

MANTRA MUKIM is a poet and essayist from Raipur, India, currently based in Oxford.  His poetry shaped by global modernism, personal inquiry and the long shadow of environmental disaster in India. He has been awarded the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (Eutopia-SIF), Chancellor’s Scholarship, and most recently the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for his research work on global modernism.

GLITCHWORK, tracks the uneven lineages of Central India, building on modernist legacies and reckoning with the spectres of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Mantra Mukim’s debut poetry collection is situated in a timeless, forested grid, poisedon the verge of industrial erasure. This grid, a restless site of extraction and production, also brims with potential for lushness, fey ambience, and petite clearings. Its three long poems consist of fragments on a mysterious Cold War ‘plant’, remixes of Surdas (the medieval-Braj poet), notes on palaeolithic hands, philology of the line, anomalies in a lunar-roving vehicle, and the origin myths of Raipur.

NAT RAHA (Chair) will introduce the poets and host the discussion.  She is a poet and activist-scholar. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024, finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards 2025). She teaches in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.

This event is a collaboration between Palestine Museum Scotland and The87Press.