BOOK LAUNCH Issam Zineh | Tracy Fuad | Juan Gelman

PALESTINE MUSEUM SCOTLAND in association with The87Press is delighted to present three new poetry collections, Issam Zineh's Unceded Land, Tracy Fuad's Portal and the first bilingual translation of Juan Gelman's 1979 Notes/Notas.

ISSAM ZINEH is a Palestinian-American poet, editor and public health worker. His debut poetry collection Unceded Land is a lyrical marvel, tracing the lines of intimacy, loss, and the colonial legacy in Palestine. With an eye that wanders from the subtly beautiful to the crushingly blunt, his poetry seeks out the "primordial egg within us," the truths that are "traded in broken bones."

TRACY FUAD is a poet and writer based in Berlin. Her second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape.

JUAN GELMAN (1930-2014) has been widely hailed as one of the greatest contemporary Spanish-language poets as well as Argentina’s poet laureate, publishing more than twenty books of poetry over the course of his lifetime. This bilingual edition makes Juan Gelman’s hauntingly beautiful poetry collection, Notes / Notas, available to English-speaking audiences in its entirety for the first time. Originally published in 1979, Notas / Notes was composed in exile, following the 1976 military coup d'etat in Argentina. This period of state terrorism resulted in the disappearance of writers, comrades, and Gelman’s own son. Gelman's work will be read by ARIANNA ASFARI.

ARIANNA ASFARI is a translator and doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She examines Argentine militant poetry of the 1960s and 70s alongside traditions of Persian militant poetics deployed as tools of anticolonial resistance.  She is a translator working across three languages: Persian, Spanish and Russian

The event will be hosted by JESSICA WIDNER, Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde.  She is the author of Interiors, a novel. 

This event is FREE, but booking is essential as space in the Museum is limited.  Please note that we have a strict no food or drinks policy in the Museum and you will be asked to kindly stow any big bags before moving around the space.

Photo by Natali Ko