The second volume of poet and critic Abdullah Al-Samti‘s book, titled “The Body of the Text Between the Spine and the Ribs,” is set to be released soon. This volume includes 60 critical readings exploring contemporary poetry in its various forms, movements, and generations.
The first volume was published in January 2025 and featured 50 studies and critical articles that were originally published between 1996 and 2024 in newspapers and magazines.
Published by Al-Adham Publishing House (Cairo), the book dives deep into the art of modern Arabic poetry. It is divided into three main sections: “The Body of the Text,” “The Spine,” and “The Ribs.”
Al-Samti’s work examines diverse poetic forms within the Arab poetic scene, offering critical readings of the works of numerous contemporary Arab poets, including Qassim Haddad, Nouri Al-Jarrah, Abbas Beydoun, Saif Al-Rahbi, Nizar Qabbani, Mahmoud Darwish, and Rifaat Sallam. Additionally, it explores the works of modernist poets from the first quarter of the 21st century, such as Salem Al-Hashemi, Fawz Ria, and Aliya Al-Jarrah.
The book opens with an in-depth study titled “Between the Rhetoric of the Image and Its Narration: The Current Prose Poem and the Crafting of Aesthetic Vision,” followed by studies on the stylistic characteristics of 1970s poetry in Egypt and the experience of Lebanese poet Naheed Darjani. It also presents theoretical readings on topics such as poetic languages, poetic consciousness, the aesthetics of the unwritten, and other significant critical themes.
Table of Contents
Part One: The Body of the Text
- Between the Rhetoric of the Image and Its Narration
- Stylistic Characteristics of 1970s Poetry in Egypt
- Naheed Darjani: Between Linguistic Explosion and Enriching the Imagination
Part Two: The Spine
4. The Aesthetics of the Modernist Vertical Poem
5. The Prose Poem Is Not the Pinnacle of Arab Poetic Creativity
6. Words in Poetry
7. Poetic Consciousness and the Transcendental Horizon
8. The Language of the Poem and the Poem of the Language
9. The Work of Imagination
10. The Aesthetics of the Unwritten in Literary Texts
11. The Wildness of Critical Imagination
12. How to Write an Exquisite Prose Poem?
13. On the Relational Nature of the Image
14. Between the Poem and Beautiful Prose Speech
15. The Metaphysics of Astonishment
16. The Poetics of Inquiry and the Distant Horizon
17. Poetry and the Crafting of Aesthetic Context
Part Three: The Ribs
18. The New Saudi Poetry
19. Post-New Saudi Poetry: From Scene to Panorama
20. Fawzia Abu Khalid and the First Prose Poetry Collection in Saudi Arabia
21. When Things Speak and the Poem Listens
22. Give Me Another Card, Abbas Beydoun?
23. The Poet’s Desert
24. The Orbits of the Poem by Poet Dakheel Al-Khalifa
25. A Critical Vision of the Poetry of Jassim Al-Sahih
26. A Critical Pick from the Traveler’s Garden: The Land Gathers Its Fragments
27. Saif Al-Rahbi Extends a Hand at the Edge of the World
28. A Beautiful and Dreamy Perspective on Death
29. When the Founder of Facebook Becomes the Title of a Poetry Collection
30. Venus Faiq and the Poetics of Innocent Childhood
31. Abdullah Al-Saykhan: Singing at the Gates of Tayma
32. Ahmad A’il Faqihi in “Morning of the Villages”
33. Journeying to Torment through the Intellectual Nature of Indifference
34. Huda Al-Daghfaq: A New Passion and the Manifestations of Short Poetic Structures
35. Latifa Qari in Her Collection: “I Tasted It”
36. Celebrating Dramatic Awareness and the Dialogism of Things
37. Rawda Al-Haj and the Poem of Fragility
38. Samira Al-Sulaimani: The Poet of Sorrow and the Dream of Joy
39. The Dresses of the Poem and the One Crossing to the Other Shore of Poetry
40. Snapshots of Small Time
41. Whiteness in the Imagination
42. Nizar Qabbani: A Little Love Letter
43. Dr. Eid Saleh: The Poem “Because I”
44. A Reading of Mohammed Al-Domeini’s Poem: “A Bird That Misses the Shots”
45. On the Unique Principle in Poetry
46. Abdullah Mohammed Al-Zamzami: The Saudi Poet and the Sign of Sorrow
47. Rola Majid and Her Three Verses
48. Aliya Al-Jarrah: A Poem Beyond the World and Reaching the Unspoken
49. Fawz Ria When She Releases the Bird of Poetry
50. The Light of Your Eyes, or Are They Two Stars?
This anticipated release promises to enrich the landscape of Arabic literary criticism, offering fresh insights and a profound exploration of the evolving forms and themes of contemporary poetry
