Farid Matuk
Robert Bear GuerraFarid Matuk is the author of "Moon Mirrored Indivisible," "Redolent," "The Real Horse," "This Is a Nice Neighborhood," and "My Daughter La Chola." They are also the translator from the Spanish of "The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist" by the Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta.
Awards: Anna Rabinowitz Award (Poetry Society of America), USA Fellowship (United States Artists)
Communities: Arizona Author, Tucsonan, LGBTQ+, Hispanic or Latinx, Mixed Race, Arab-American
The Poetics of Place
From the pastoral to the postmodern — from Paterson, New Jersey, to the Sonoran Desert — poets have always sought to explore the reflexive relationship between person and place. Today our authors will discuss home, displacement, and the interplay between place and imagination.
Student Union Kiva (Seats 100)
Sat, Mar 15, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Poetry
Signing area: Sales & Signing Area - UA Campus Store, Main Floor (following presentation)
Panelists:
Forrest Gander,
Farid Matuk,
Gabriel Palacios
Moderator: Gabriel Dozal
Acts of Defiance
Poetry gives us permission to rebel, to misbehave, to speak truth to power and to imagine futures better than the ones we've been presented with. With wit, craft, and profound courage, these panelists harness language to celebrate small victories and teach us the joys of artistic disobedience.
Student Union Kiva (Seats 100)
Sun, Mar 16, 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Poetry
Signing area: Sales & Signing Area - UA Campus Store, Main Floor (following presentation)
Panelists:
Alison Hawthorne Deming,
Perry Janes,
Farid Matuk
Moderator: Logan Phillips
Books:
Moon Mirrored Indivisible
Poetry
University of Chicago Press
March 2025
ISBN 9780226840000
96 pages
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. More/less
The Real Horse
Poems
Poetry
University of Arizona Press
February 2018
ISBN 9780816537341
88 pages
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. More/less
