To the Hitchhiking Dead

"To the Hitchhiking Dead is a book-length sequence culled from notebooks made between 1986-1988 when hitch-hiking in Europe and England or otherwise doing nothing. An unknown poet - even to himself - who didn't know he was seeking and fleeing lost love, and assured he was the only Asian freak on the roads in nail varnish and pearls. Those notebook sketches were towards an epical rhapsody that never got written [...] Returning to recover the project 35 years later sees a rapprochement between the two poet-selves. I am writing into the fragments of the past and the notebooks are writing into my occluded present." -Khaled Nurul Hakim, from the Introduction


"One of the striking achievements of To the Hitchhiking Dead is that it gives us the splendidly combative Khaled Hakim in a moment of transformation. The verve and fully engaged wit of his poetry is all here, graced with adept transitions of mood and tone for the bright spectrum of tenderness, anger, reverence and regret. The young Khaled is out there open-eyed discovering the raw world in chance meetings, 'as real as Norman Wisdom singing lieder'. The visions and revisions of this Bildungsroman span the years crafted in a poetry as generous in its skill as its spirit; and there is always another note to catch us out:

'There's something wrong in everything
Accept the everything that hurts
but don't accept the hurt' "

-Kelvin Corcoran
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