Y Knots

Dr. Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet and critic. His work has appeared in, amongst others, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The London Magazine, Lighthouse, and Envoi. He has published several poetry collections with Cinnamon Press, including, But It Was an Important Failure and To the Middle of Love, as well as this debut fiction novella, Via Negativa — a parable of exile. His next collection with Cinnamon will be Morning Lit: Portals After Alia will be published in Spring 2022. He has published critical essays on a number of writers, including George Eliot, Lawrence Durrell, and Henry Miller. Omar has a PhD in English Literature from King’s College London and is presently an Assistant Professor in English at the American University in Dubai.

If, as Sabbagh writes, writing is always a performance and projection of a self, then Y Knots is the performance of a self breath-takingly prodigious and heterodox. That Sabbagh is able to weave this self into characters whose tussles leap off the page so compellingly shows a master at work. — Peter Salmon, author of An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida;Y Knots hold the Hanging Gardens of Babylon teleported into the tired aridity of a postmodern mind. The lushness of Sabbagh’s characters and settings is nurtured with such loving drip-irrigation precision that you'll find yourself enamored with both his beauties and his beasts. — Svetlana Lavochkina, novelist, poet, translator;Intelligent and passionate, these stories are singularities that make all the difference. Sabbagh seems to be, as he describes one of his characters, ‘an inexorably-thinking man’, but there is a certain rawness and playfulness to the stories which makes the philosophical grounding often quite hilarious. Sabbagh is also a unique chronicler of the Middle East and globalization. — Adnan Mahmutovic, author of At the Feet of Mothers