Description: "Multilayered lyric poems that resist systems of power and foster intimacy. A previously undocumented child of Syrian and Peruvian parents, an inheritor of lineages marked by colonial and gendered violence, and a survivor of childhood sexual assault, Farid Matuk approaches the musical capacities of verse not as mere excitation or decoration but as forms that reclaim pleasure and presence. Entering the sonic constellations of Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the reader finds relief from nesting layers of containment that systems of power impose on our bodies and imaginations. In this hall of historical mirrors, fictions of identity are refracted, reflected, and multiplied into a vast field of possibilities. Matuk's meditations on place and power offer experiments in self-understanding, moving through expansive conversations between a lyric "I" and others, including poets, the speaker's partner, ancestors, and the reader, creating spaces for strange intimacy. Each of the book's four sections of poems builds on one another to ask how we might form a collective-a people-not founded in orthodoxies of originality but in the mutual work of mirroring one another"--Provided by publisher.
Brief description: Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood, My Daughter La Chola, and The Real Horse. With visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Matuk's work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists.
Review Quotes: "Matuk's poems offer an exactness of first-person exposition and exploration. . . Edging his circle of subject matter beyond the immediate domestic and fatherhood of some of that earlier work, the ripples of this current collection still hold at that central core, but move further out into the world, attempting a declarative staccato across a firm lyric, something that has long been present within his work. . . . In clear tones, Matuk articulates his observations across an increasingly hostile culture, from within an America ramped up in rhetoric, domestic terror and foreign wars, and even the purpose of poetry across such divides."-- "rob mclennan's blog"