In Surplus Skin, Ibrahim Abdelfattah performs a visceral autopsy of the modern poetic soul, peeling back the epidermis of the mundane to reveal the hemorrhaging silence beneath. This collection is a surgical deconstruction of the "night" that has thickened into a suffocating, excess layer of flesh—a "vast prison without walls" where time gains weight and compresses the chest of the city .
Ibrahim Abdelfattah's voice operates within the phenomenology of alienation, where the self is a fluid, unstable construct, terrified that a name might stick to it permanently . He navigates a Cairo that is less a geography and more a "capital of ice," a landscape where the "meekness of killers" allows War to sit casually on a balcony, smoking a cigarette while the world trembles . Here, the boundaries between the corporeal and the ethereal dissolve; memory is a "coat heavy with mud" that one yearns to shed, and identity is merely a mask worn in the "disguise room," sustained by the "K-particle of simile".
These poems are a manifesto for the "ecstatic wanderers" and the "poets who corrupted love," offering a stark, unflinching look at a reality where endings are fair but brutal, and where the only salvation lies in the "laughter etched onto the face of ruin".
Sulfur Editions, 2025
