The Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi (b.1919-d.1982) is approached with apprehension. The grotesque aesthetic and malaise which permeates his poetry has been criticized for breathing the “enchantment of despair” into the generation of the sixties and seventies. Horrific, alienating, nightmarish, and apocalyptic are only a few words critics have used to describe Hawi’s poetry. However, Hawi successfully created a poetic language which was celebrated as modernist to its core. Mahmoud Darwish’s cryptic re-staging of Hawi’s suicide, on his apartment balcony in 1982, highlights the poet’s keen insight into the world but also his propensity to repulse his readers and associates. In an interview, Darwish says that “Hawi is a poet he read once and will not go back to reading a second time.” What do we do with a poet who is, on the one hand, an exemplar of modernist poetry and, on the other hand, labeled as unreadable? This paper teases out the centrifugal force of Hawi’s poetry which diverts our attention away. I explore the function of unreadability/repulsiveness and its connection to the modernist project. I argue that Hawi’s grotesque imagery alone does not define his poetry. It is the difficulty associated with confronting his poetry that constitutes his modernist style. By difficult, I do not mean linguistic and syntactic complexity, but rather visual and aural intensity. Hawi is difficult to read and listen to insofar as he disturbs and disrupts humanist and modernist sensibilities. The scope of this paper focuses on his last collection of poetry, Min jahim al-kumudiya(1979), which appears after a decade of poetic silence, and three years before his suicide. It represents a late style that weaves together intertextuality, mythopoesis, a lexicon of the grotesque, and culminates in the ominous silence of a poem with no text. Hawi occupies a complex position among the modern Arab poets and their literary predecessors. He poses a challenge to scholars of Arabic literature as he invites us to suspend Darwish’s advice and revisit a poetic vision which is at once unique and marginal, repellent and ensnaring.