[03/17/25] Matuk, Farid: Moon Mirrored Indivisible

University of Chicago, paperback

Publication Date: March 17, 2025

Publisher Marketing: Multilayered lyric poems that resist systems of power and foster intimacy. 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.