This Isa Nice Neighborhood
This Isa Nice Neighborhood
2010
ISBN: 978-0981522753
Letter Machine Editions
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.
Awards
Honorable Mention, 2011 Arab American Book Awards
Finalist, Norma Farber First Book Award by the Poetry Society of America
Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets series chosen by Geoffrey G. O’Brien
Reviews
Bombay Gin, Shawn McDaniel, March 20,2024
“A Very Earnest Bewilderment,” Poetry Foundation, Mary Austin Speaker, November 14, 2012
“Incongruent Optimism,” Project Muse, Dale Smith, November/December 2012
“This Isa Nice Transpersonal Protean Lyric: Engagement in Farid Matuk,” Denver Quarterly, Cynthia Arrieu-King
Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Poetry Society of America, New American Poets Series