Farid Matuk

Robert Bear Guerra

Farid 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

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