Overview

Though deeply personal at its core, Khamriyyat Hong Kong is an unsentimental, unapologetic, confessional, and confrontational collection with a gutsy impersonal touch and keen-eyed cultural politics. It sails comparatively--and seemingly drunkenly--across disciplines, literatures, religions, arts, and cultures, dissecting such unsettled concepts as belief, desire, sexuality, love, paradise, old age, creativity, war, and dogma. What emerges at the end of its journey is a collage of intertwining oppositions: reality and dream, eroticism and decorousness, logic and incoherence, rationality and absurdity, seriousness and playfulness. It is a poetic collection that does not allow the reader to relax as everything in it is more provocative than pacific.

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Reviews

""Khamriyyat Hong Kong is delicate, yet audacious. Uncharacterized, yet unmistakably a signature. It is both straightforward and deeply metaphoric, dark yet brilliant. It embodies the ambivalent coexistence of belief and doubt, praise and criticism, austerity and desire."" --C. J. Anderson-Wu, author of Impossible to Swallow: Collection of Short Stories About the White Terror in Taiwan ""This intoxicating collection is a dive by an obsessed devotee in the depths of immutable truths as his poems rage over war, love, passion, and suffering in rich dark cascades of the stark, the bittersweet and the hypnotic."" --Akin Jeje, author of Smoked Pearl: Poems of Hong Kong and Beyond ""Elbeshlawy's verse moves between the confessional and the confrontational with rawness, precision, and an often-disarming sense of humor . . . he touches on subjects as vast and divergent as sexual desire, creative futility, war, religion, identity, America, Gaza, and existential solitude . . . Khamriyyat Hong Kong is a fierce, searching, and often uncomfortable read--but therein lies its power."" --Azam Abidov, Poet ""An astute observer of people and places, it's almost as if Ahmed's powers of observation have been sharpened by his status as an 'outsider'--a poet from elsewhere. Within this collection you will find the work of a poet at the height of his powers. An assured, direct, perceptive, and at times raw poetic voice."" --Alan Jefferies, Poet

Author Information

Ahmed Elbeshlawy is a scholar of comparative literature, author, and poet. His books include Sahara (2023), Unappeasable Ghosts (2021), Savage Charm (2019), Twenty Five Meditations on Writing and Subjectivity (2019), Woman in Lars von Trier's Cinema (2016), America in Literature and Film (2011), and various articles and book chapters in different anthologies.

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