All that shatters, All that remains (forthcoming)

All That Shatters, All That Remains is a poetic project that investigates how meaning, identity, and ethical orientation persist under conditions of fragmentation, displacement, and structural pressure. Composed of poems and reflective fragments, the work explores how individual experience is shaped, strained, and often misrecognized by larger symbolic and social systems.

The book is structured as a cyclical movement through five sections — SAND, HEAT, FUSION, GLASS, and SHARDS — tracing a progression from formlessness and anticipation through intimacy and collision, toward fracture and residue. The structure allows the work to be read in both directions, emphasizing repetition, return, and transformation rather than linear development.

Rather than presenting a stable narrative voice, the text unfolds through rupture, accumulation, and reflection, mirroring how contemporary subjects navigate loss, exile, technological mediation, and competing regimes of meaning. Language appears as both a means of ordering experience and as a site where such ordering repeatedly fails.

The project approaches poetry as a form of ethical attention, preserving what resists abstraction and instrumentalization. In doing so, it articulates a vulnerable human perspective shaped by systems of power and representation, while insisting on the irreducibility of lived experience — a concern that continues across Karim Gamil’s work in theatre, film, and digital contexts.