Jazra Khaleed : The Light That Burns Us

October 10, 2024

The English-language debut of Jazra Khaleed, one of Greece’s most radical poetic voices—now in an expanded edition—is an unapologetic indictment of the wrongs faced by immigrants, by a rudderless young European generation, by leftist activists in a Greece and a Europe blighted by neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization.

Born in Chechnya in 1979, Khaleed is a poet who seems very Greek and not Greek at all. Employing elegant rhythms, contemporary street speech, and flashes of Byzantine and New Testament Greek, his poetry reflects a refined erudition and control that Greek readers have trouble equating with a man named Jazra. Khaleed's poems—written at times from a very personal perspective, and at others from that of an objective outsider, but always disruptive, vehement, electrifying—tear the untroubled reader back to a reality that may well be dangerous.

The English-language debut of Jazra Khaleed, one of Greece’s most radical poetic voices—now in an expanded edition—is an unapologetic indictment of the wrongs faced by immigrants, by a rudderless young European generation, by leftist activists in a Greece and a Europe blighted by neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization.