Osama Alomar

Personified animals (snakes, wolves, sheep), natural things (a swamp, a lake, a rainbow, trees), mankind's creations (trucks, swords, zeroes) are all characters in The Teeth of the Comb. They aspire, they plot, they hope, they destroy, they fail, they love. These wonderful small stories animate new realities and make us see our reality anew. Reading Alomar's sly moral fables and sharp political allegories, the reader always sits up a little straighter, and a little wiser. Here is the title story: Some of the teeth of the comb were envious of the class differences that exist between humans. They strived desperately to increase their height, and, when they succeeded, began to look with disdain on their colleagues below. After a little while the comb's owner felt a desire to comb his hair. But when he found the comb in this state he threw it in the garbage.

A prominent practitioner of the Arabic “very short story” (al-qisa al-qasira jiddan), Osama Alomar’s poetic fictions embody the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran filtered through the violent gray absurdity of Assad’s police state. Fullblood Arabian is the first publication of Alomar’s strange, often humorously satirical allegories, where good and evil battle with indifference, avarice, and compassion using striking imagery and effervescent language.

This bundle of four Poetry Pamphlets (9-12 in the series) includes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blasts Cries Laughter Osama Alomar's Fullblood Arabian Oliverio Girondo's Poems to Read on a Streetcar Fifteen Iraqi Poets (edited by Dunya Mikhail)