Salim Barakat is a Syrian-Kurdish poet and novelist, whose emergence on the Arabic poetic scene in the early 1970s was resounding. This paper will examine samples of Barak?t's poetry in the larger context of the Arabic prose poem project. Although in his early work, Barakat experimented with a mixed form of verse and prose, he ultimately took up prose as matter for poetry, positing a distinct definition of the "poetic" rooted in an interrogation of the Arabic language and a close attentiveness to and aggressive playfulness with its grammar and syntax. "Poetry," he states, "is a "bloody" wager which drains language, like blood-letting, so it may either live or die." A living language, as he sees, it is not language as accumulation but language as perpetual fascination. Poetry thus becomes an violent and deliberate dispelling of the comfort and familiarity we settle into with language. Salim Barakat's confrontational relationship with Arabic, is often tied to his preoccupation with what critics have called "Kurdish themes." However, if the Kurdish cause (if we may call it that), is a motivating factor in the background of Barakat's project, it most resonantly manifests itself, not as theme or subject matter, but as an invasion of the Arabic language and an "othering" of it from itself. Sidelining the debate over form which has accompanied the prose poem since the early 1960s, Barakat reveals the Arabic prose poem's potential in re-imagining the notion of the "poetic" as a linguistic intervention.