Being on The Brink

In Being on The Brink (Sulfur Editions, 2025), Ahmad Klij orchestrates a phantasmagoric symphony of displacement, Klij's verse operates within a terrifying surrealism-a "hallucinatory realism"-where the laws of physics bow to the logic of atrocity. He boldly envies the dead, for their spine's immunity to the heavy burden of earth and memory. Here, the heart undergoes a violent metempsychosis: from butterfly to coal, to petroleum, only to be weaponized and fired back as a projectile of love. The collection charts the exile as a corporeal mutation; the refugee is a "green corpse" anxious for a plot of earth , a traveler whose identity is merely a mask of sadness. Yet, amidst this debris, love emerges as a fierce, jagged resistance-a lover returning from war with one and a half legs to offer flowers , or a map of nations redrawn with a stick of lipstick. Accompanied by the visceral, fragmented artwork of Ghadah Kamal , Being on The Brink is a manifesto for the survivors of the apocalypse who wait for freedom-that "turtle that never arrives". It is a haunting testament that does not seek to heal the wound, but to sing from within its bleeding center.

Ahmed Klij

He is a German-Kurdish poet and writer born in Damascus in 1986 and studied journalism at Damascus University. He has published in both Kurdish and Arabic and has focused on the cultural and literary sphere in his writings. Following the conflict in Syria, he moved between Iraqi Kurdistan and Istanbul and worked as a radio journalist and focused on preparing cultural programs documenting the Syrian cultural movement and collective memory.
In 2018, at the invitation of the Joan Vinzoli i Pladevall Poetry Museum, he participated with several musicians in a poetry-music reading tour entitled "The Road to Aleppo", which covered six cities in Catalonia/Spain. He also attended the Hamburg School of Journalism (HMS) and produced his first documentary "Roads of Steel" for Phoenix TV. He has lived in Hamburg since 2019.He published a poetry collection with Sulfur Editions and another poetry collection with Safsafa Publishing House in Egypt.