The Palestinian poet Hussam Marouf has published his second poetry collection "The Faithful Barber to His Dead Customers" with Al-Nahda Al-Arabiya publishing house in Lebanon, as part of the Aswat Poetry series, which is his collection that won the Afaaq Development Grant 2022.

His collection discusses many movement-related ideas between the self and existence, and also philosophically explores the beginning of human creation, and how the integration between clay and meaning occurs, marking the emergence of human civilization. 

Hussam Marouf's texts manifest a renewing poetic voice, featuring sonic experimentation and contemplative approaches to things by approaching them and delving into their details, as well as offering subjective interpretations of daily phenomena that cast their shadows over the self. 

Marouf seems to be an analytical contemplator of human convictions, putting all events within his poetic movement to the test, as he recovers the description of the scene through an epistemic vision based on deconstruction and reconstruction; the scene in his text appears ever-changing, multi-interpretative, and opens onto more than one meaning.

Hussam Marouf addresses in his texts sorrow as a raw material for laughter, death as an endless experimentation during life, and solitude as a vehicle that carries man toward more knowledge. He also embodies the woman in his texts as a voice that dwells within the man's self, canceling within him impotence and estrangement from the world. 

His texts are dominated by astonishing and shocking depths in many places, where the distance between reason and emotion dissolves, and his poetic dimension becomes a source of movement, sound, ebb and flow in ideas. 

From the collection's texts, titled "The Mass of Convictions":

"From soft clay, placed in the void, the poet was created, and from dry clay in molds, the constants were created. 

Keep cooking, O great ovens,

Melt away, O mass of convictions.

All people were created, and all died; it is time, whenever a piece of it falls into the oven, a person dies.

There are no voids between the bodies of the dead, but it is the philosophy of life in distributing tragedy.

There is no eternal shape for antiquity; it is a sad music coming from afar.

Like a flower growing in its clay, death grows,

Like watering that flower, convictions self-destruct.

No one knows the number of steps to the last statue, 

A foot withers before planting the correct heart’s direction, making love a bird hiding its limp, cutting the other foot to fly.

The universe does not need air bubbles, but a single quotation of God to reveal meaning.

Ascend, O smoke, the ladder of space; I do not believe otherwise, consciousness is formed.

Do not touch shaping, O consciousness, and touch the warmth of a strange moment stuck in your range. 

Conviction is in the pot, it neither lives nor dies, so gather your steam, O body, be the sign of transformation,

And knead time with your hand, O human; that which falls from it is your fixed shape, the voice of the one oven."

It is mentioned that Hussam Marouf had published his first poetry collection "The Smell of Glass to Death" with Awraq Publishing House in 2015. It won the Badour Al-Turky International Poetry Award at the Arab world level, and he also received the Mahmoud Darwish Museum Poetry Award the same year for the same collection. 

In 2020, the poet published his first novel "Ram's Chisel" with Al-Ru'aa and Jusoor Cultural House, in which he focused on the idea of beauty and ugliness in the world and the societal convictions imposed on women regarding that. 

In 2021, poet Hussam Marouf participated in the Oslo International Poetry Conference. He and a delegation of intellectuals from the Gaza Strip were prevented from participating in the 2019 Amman International Book Fair after being invited and having his evenings included in the exhibition’s schedule of events. 

Hussam Marouf works as a journalist, writing on cultural and political affairs. He has hundreds of critical and analytical articles on poetry, novels, and short stories. He works as a correspondent for Erem News on cultural affairs, including his critical articles. He has many in-depth interviews in the Writing Lab with Arab poets and novelists, while publishing his political reports focused on Israeli occupation violations against Palestinians on Raseef 22 website. 

He has also published articles in several Arab newspapers and websites such as Okaz, Al-Nahar Al-Arabi, and Magazine 28 website, where he has been the director of activities and events since 2013. He has also published on Fas'ha, Iraqi Nakheel, Oxygen, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida newspaper, Al-Ayyam newspaper, and other websites and newspapers.

Many of Hussam Marouf's poems about the war on Gaza have been translated into English and Spanish, and his poetry has been published in several American magazines, most notably "The Baffler". His poems have also been translated into Aryan, Bulgarian, and French. 

Hussam Marouf has published, in French and Arabic, a collection of stories about the coronavirus pandemic, which were turned into comic drawings as part of the "insert the title" project, funded by the French Consulate in Gaza, represented by the French Institute in 2021.