I have brought you a severed hand

Saturday 8 November, 5–8pm

un Projects × se Dessaisir Publishing × Divided

At: Collingwood House [Venue address to be sent out to attendees on the day]

Join us at Collingwood House on Saturday 8 November for a reading from Ghayath Almadhoun, a Syrian-Palestinian poet based in Sweden, whose recent collection ‘I have brought you a severed hand’ was published by Divided in 2024.

Fluid and unselfconscious, Ghayath Almadhoun writes love poems in the shape of nightmares: ‘I have brought you a severed hand’ is a surreal mix of absurd humour, heteroerotic lust and dead seriousness. Caught between two exiles, the one inherited from his Palestinian father and the one he chose and lives, Almadhoun attempts to explain water and tame hope.

Following a reading from Almadhoun, un Magazine 19.2 'We Swear We Saw, Notebooks about the Wor(l)d' This Guest Editor Azza Zein will host a Q&A with the author. Zein’s incoming issue which explores the variety of methodologies found in artists’ and writers’ notebooks, genealogies of resistance and the modes of documenting what is witnessed.

Also reading at this event is Ender Başkan, whose collection ‘Two Hundred Million Musketeers’ is coming out with Giarmondo that same week. Abbra Kotlarczyk, past un Magazine contributor, artist and a writer who works with paper as a foundational medium.

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‘I have brought you a severed hand’ and other titles from un Magazine and Divided Publishing’s catalog available to purchase at the events. Refreshments will also be made available.

This event is free to attend, please rsvp via humantix to receive the Collingwood House address ahead of the event. If you have any access needs or questions please contact un Projects.

This event is supported by the City of Yarra.

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Divided is an independent publisher in Brussels and London who publish authors who cannot balance or resolve their contradictions, who struggle to make peace in the industry or genre or category or world in which they end up.

un Projects, founded in Melbourne 2004, publishes writing that emerges from art making, providing an independent platform for critical discussions about local artistic practice.

se Dessaisir Publishing lingers on a threshold between thought and affect, between longing and form. A counter-wish, sweetly disguised through books, art, poetry, and music–a place for works that resist closure and weave through intimacy and resistance.

un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.