Released 30th November, 2022 // 150 pages // 978-1-915079-64-0
Abdul Kader El-Janabi’s A Horseback Afternoon is a selection of poems which encompasses a life in writing, spanning forty years, from 1975 to 2015. Abdul Kader El-Janabi’s poetry carves deep into the history of literature. Self described as a “tiger of languages in a jungle of dictionaries”, El-Janabi writes with a nod to the surrealist tradition, mixed with the broad technicolour brushstrokes of old masters like Charles Baudelaire, Denise Levetov, and Wallace Stevens.
PRAISE for A Horseback Afternoon:
This astonishing book celebrates language's endless powers of renewal in the hands of a master, and it underlines surrealism's enduring relevance and political and cultural importance in a world that becomes more unreal, hyper-real and, yes, surreal every day.
- Ian McMillan, The Verb (BBC Radio 3)
This book is the most important event in UK publishing for some years. An IV shot direct from the surrealist unconscious. For any student of poetry this is an absolute must have. I can't quite believe it’s here - it feels like experiencing the last fifty years in a dreamy collage, reawakening and reconfiguring our historical perspective. This great collection will change the landscape of literary studies for generations to come and, hopefully, renew again the international socialist commitment of poets interested in resisting the status quo of crisis and emergency. Living legends do exist but it is rare to see books of this stature positioned in a manner that befits the intention of its content; yet more exceptional work from Broken Sleep Books.
- Azad Ashim Sharma, Ergastulum
ABOUT Abdul Kader El-Janabi:
Iraqian-born, Parisian-based, rode the winged horse of the rebellious sixties with a flower in his hand to stab his silhouette with, Abdul Kader El-Janabi set off, at the beginning of 1970, for London looking for the fog which, through American movies, represented for him the veil between an Orient of certitude and an occident of doubt. To write poetry then was to perforate this veil in order to create new poetic correspondences. A whole world of a voluntary exile showed him the need to go beyond dualities and simple contradictions.
He founded in Paris, in 1973, Le Désir Libertaire, the first surrealist Arabic review, banned in the Arab world for its critical approach to social and religious issues. But his involvement in surrealism at the time was in no way to poke around in the linen closet of surrealism’s obsolete inventions, but a real attachment to Breton’s theoretical mind behind the poem. For he knew that to become effective surrealist was first to outdistance the repetitive, then to be ready to doubt even the ideals that our founding fathers have struggled for.
Author of many collections of poetry and essays, a translator into Arabic of many American and European poets such as Paul Celan, René Daumal, Joyce Mansour, William Carlos Williams and recently an international anthology of prose poem, Abdul Kader El-Janabi has also published into French many anthologies of modern Arabic poetry.
