A sustained address to the poet’s daughter, The Real Horse takes its cues from the child’s unapologetic disregard for things as they are, calling forth the adult world as accountable for its flaws and as an occasion for imagining otherwise. Offering a handbook on the possibilities of the verse line, this collection is precise in its figuring, searching in its intellect, and alert in its music. Here lyric energy levitates into constellations that hold their analytic composure, inviting readers into a shared practice of thinking and feeling that interrogates the confounding intersections of gender, race, class, and national status not as abstract concepts but as foundational intimacies. Matuk’s interrogations of form cut a path through the tangle of a daughter’s position as a natural-born female citizen of the “First World” and of the poet’s position as a once-undocumented immigrant of mixed ethnicity whose paternity is unavoidably implicated in patriarchy. Rejecting nostalgia for homelands, notions of embodied value (self-made or otherwise), and specious ideas of freedom, these luminously multifaceted poem sequences cast their lot with the lyric voice, trusting it to hold a space where we might follow the child’s ongoing revolution against the patrimony of selfhood and citizenship.

The Real Horse: Poems (Camino del Sol)

Literature & Fiction

Matuk, Farid

Poetry

University of Arizona Press

Poetry. Can identity be pliant and penetrable? Can the speech act be one of attention over intention, can play and fluidity open onto an ethic? THIS ISA NICE NEIGHBORHOOD, Farid Matuk's first full-length collection, says yes. Yes to the rejection of any opposition between politics and aesthetics, between rhetoric and poetics. Yes to vulnerability. Yes to a poetry willing to enact the errors, uncertainties, and tangled complexities of our political, sexual, and social lives. Testing both narrative and lyric, Matuk finds desire at the root of each, a root from which, these poems suggest, compassion and permission grow intertwined.

This Isa Nice Neighborhood

Letter Machine Editions

Poetry. "My daughter," the text tells us, "my daughter": among crises economic and personal, the histories and documents of atrocities, the missing limbs and mummified ears, the Golden Girls and the construction and questioning of genders, Matuk makes it all a personal issue.My Daughter La Chola Near Sonnetcall to me the one among your namesthat opens beneath you intimateas your next thought cymballing on the shorearranging all those grains of sandmica in the mosaic of the bank's porticoall your lived and storied coordinatesthat you are youngthat you are blankin the air in the cluster of antennathe remaining Barton men make of themselves riding backthe yellow fire hills of Californiaslip between understandings namethe single ridge of bell bronze that tins out the wind

My Daughter La Chola

Ahsahta Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Matuk, Farid. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Matuk, Farid

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Matuk, Farid. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Real Horse: Poems (Camino del Sol)

This Isa Nice Neighborhood

My Daughter La Chola