Luqmān Maḥmūd Al-Aʿmāl al-Shiʿriyya العربية 1447

This first volume of the Complete Poetic Works of the Syrian-Kurdish poet Luqman Mahmoud — a native of Amuda — brings together seven poetry collections spanning more than three decades of exile, memory, and the Kurdish wound: Sorrowful Joys, Steps that Breathe Distance: When Adam Had Feet, Delshastan, The Distant Moon of My Freedom, A Means to Understand Exiles, and The Captive Water. Moving between prose poetry and poetic narrative, Mahmoud weaves together the mythology of Amuda — its notorious cinema fire, its ghosts, its dried-up "Pig River" — with the bloodied history of Kurdistan, the ache of displacement, and the search for the self in the mirror of exile. In these poems, water becomes a captive, dust becomes memory, and the hunted gazelle becomes the emblem of a pursued people. A major work that is at once a poet's life, a place's life, and a people's life.