Poetry. "I find it hard to read this book without looking up and wondering who and what and where I am. It returns me again and again to wondering what a person is, what speaking is, and what we mean by 'the world.' Deterritorialization is one of its main concerns and main activities, something that I think can be said about Zaher's work in general, whether he is undermining the reality effects of nation states and their borders, or of corporate spectral omnipresence, or unpeeling his own personal multiply-deterritorialized lyric self. It is vital, lucid, and uncompromising work that leaves this reader feeling more alive and open to 'our moment,' and less secure than ever about what that might mean. Despite its often slashing irony, I find it a very tender book as well. The gentleness and the slightness of the form cradles a reader (this one anyway) preventing panic and interpretative foreclosure."—Anthony McCann

The Revolution Happened and You Didn't Call Me

Literature & Fiction

Zaher, Maged

Poetry

Tinfish Press

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. "In this long poem of poems, each poem page reads as if it could be the last. IF REALITY represents the end of the world (the end of politics the end of love the end of the poet) in its middle. It is the poem I have wanted to write, the poem that approaches an expression of the pain of the success of Nothing, the united statesian/global obliteration of the shared space of the tragic upon which it proliferates. It is the poem about end, without end."—Rachel Levitsky "Maged Zaher's IF REALITY DOESN'T WORK OUT is a text made of 'body and blood' in which our discerning and earnest global subject imbues versified sentential units with desire, loss, and a sweet buoyancy. This book is honest, strong, and bright as it navigates manifestation and dissipation, in love, in revolution, at once celebrating and mourning intimacy and its opposites."—Alli Warren

If Reality Doesn't Work Out

SplitLevel Texts

"Maged Zaher's lines flow like the rivers of Purgatory, out of a hell we hear about, and towards a Paradise he helps us intuit. Rippling in quick succession each poem holds to the turns and the eddies of feeling. He shares with us the flats of candor, the cascades of guilt, and the afternoon shimmer of utopian thought, not to mention medications and breakdowns, corporate culture, radical politics, spiritual craving, exile, the alienations of home, and cups of damn fine coffee. Despite all the love and suffering evoked here, the poet's charm never falters. (Is there any contemporary just so much fun to read)? Maged Zaher might just be Frank O'Hara's long lost Egyptian cousin. There is a life force, tested and true, passed on to us in the effortless dazzle of his lines."--Joseph Donahue Poetry.

The shadow that doesn't leave the shirt

Chatwin is thrilled to announce Maged Zaher's first published work of fiction, On Confused Love and Other Damages, his new short novella of love, longing, confusion, getting fired... and derangement. 
Sitting across from his boss, Ramy was not sure what to feel. He was always not sure what to feel, but getting fired for the first time in his life, opened up a new territory for him to be not sure what to feel about.\nRamy, half an hour earlier could have been described as: An immigrant. A poet. A Vice President of an average Seattle software company. 
An immigrant is someone who is mired in departures. A more neutral way to express an immigrant's departures is to say "false starts." An immigrant's birth in a different country is the first of these false starts. 
On Confused Love and Other Damages is the first published work of fiction by noted poet Maged Zaher. This novella follows Zaher's alter-ego, Ramy Keddis, as he is laid off from a high level tech job and fumbles through disjointed romances and conflicting ideologies. Ramy feels as torn between two cultures as he is between two lovers, somehow always caught awkwardly nowhere in between.

On Confused Love and Other Damages

Literary

Chatwin Books

The varying poetics of both ancient and modern Arabic poetry inflect this book-long exploration of the materiality of the body, negotiating the terrain of love and its denials.Zaher explores the landscape of life fraught with disappointments and occasional triumphs through fragments, lyrics, metatextual pauses, stutterings, translations of ancient poetry, and the occasional late-night email. This epic foray into fraught emotional territory is alive with Zaher s particular gift of keen observation, deft whimsy, and superb intelligence.

Consequences of My Body

Nightboat Books