Where's the lamb?

Mustafa Stitou

A spokesman praises a new kind of sacrificial animal. A woman's hair is falling out because she is wearing a headscarf. In a simulator, a god is exposed to cosmic rays for a long time. In his fifth volume of poetry, Stitou portrays a world that is both archaic and contemporary, exploring the drama of sacrifice from different angles. Is it ultimately about fear alloration? Is the danger to be averted imagined or real? Many of the poems can be read as an associative commentary on the Bible verse from which the collection takes its title—Isaac's question to his father, the patriarch Abraham, as they are on their way to the place of sacrifice and the child's heart is filled with terror. Where's the lamb? is intriguing and penetrating poetry, in which the personal and the political, dream and reality, fear and desire continuously interfere with each other.