‘Poetry mugged me in a narrow alley, poetry smacked me to death… kicked me and slapped me and shook my head violently. Ripped my heart out, drained my eyes of their tears, and then went away!’
Since I was a child I have always written about the future, but this book is about the past, and for the past, for the memory of the past. It embraces Kuala Lumpur, as she has embraced the poems in this book. Poetic Entropy is not about me, but about everything around me, the poems inside celebrate love and despair, home and exile, memories and friendships. Poetic Entropy seeks to return to the spontaneity of words and language, after they have been domesticated by etiquette. This book believes that poetry is the entropy of our conversations.
‘This is a timely and important collection; of the refugee voice, of leaving home and finding another, of loss, war and wounds, written by a poet in the great tradition of Arabic poetry. This marks a new Malaysian voice, written in our reality, wrought from the pain of the past, now present among us.’
-Bernice Chauly
About the Author
Mwaffaq Al-Hajjar is a Syrian poet, performer, and engineer who has been living in KL since 2016. He was the winner of the 2017 Migrant and Refugee Poetry competition. Mwaffaq debuted on the Malaysian stage in a production of Nassim Soleimanpour’s Blank in 2019. Mwaffaq has always wanted to prove that science is the poetry of the universe and this book is an attempt.
