ABOUT THIS BOOK

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, and creating spaces for strange intimacy. Each of the book’s four sections of poems builds on the other 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood, My Daughter La Chola, and The Real Horse. With visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Award from the Poetry Society of America. Matuk’s work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists.

REVIEWS

“Matuk’s poems, not as the shape of pleasure or language-as-pleasure but as languaged pleasure, catch us unawares. They are ‘susceptible yet undivided,’ taking us to the toothed edge but, without sharpness, turning. We move, not sure where from, as a poem, so by the end of a verse, stanza, or book, we have been to places we can’t identify on any map, ‘turned away / From the heroics and capital of literature’ and undone in a sense in a glimmering ‘queer air.’ Moon Mirrored Indivisible bends, pushing past debris and dams when needed, forceful or stagnant depending on the wind, the pressure, and the height from which words fall.”

— Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, author of "Lo Terciario / The Tertiary"

“Moon Mirrored Indivisible offers the uncanny sensation of driving brilliantly while blindfolded. The way in which the poems hold together is only part of the exhilaration. Matuk’s heightened sense of diction provides absolute physical agency for the reader. He seems to invite the invasion of fantasy at any moment. In this book, the edges of a spiraled collage meet seamlessly, and a liberated ‘I’ blares out from underneath.”

— Cedar Sigo, author of "Siren of Atlantis"

“In Matuk’s Moon Mirrored Indivisible, mirroring emerges as a magic strategy to create two from one, daring masculinist ancestors to ‘scale up.’ The poems investigate what can be forged or healed in this approximate doubling, when songbirds ‘pull their calls / Out of the noon’ and where sympathetic neurons resonate in like melody. Indivisible because, as Stein says, there’s no such thing as repetition. Nonetheless, here is a series of stunningly imperfect mirrorings, queer repetitions that have long forgotten ‘the mannered European flower code.’”

— Julian Talamantez Brolaski, author of "Of Mongrelitude"

"Transcendent work. Words stretch to their limits in Moon Mirrored Indivisible, making a new and necessary language for revolution. In a world preoccupied with occupation, these poems give liberatory breath. Read and allow yourself to be rearranged."

— Marwa Helal, author of "Ante body" and "Invasive species"

"In his wide-ranging third collection, Matuk weaves a rich tapestry of human connection, meditating on sex, war, and ancestral inheritance. . . . Matuk writes with admirable confidence and skill."

— Publishers Weekly

"What do you not know, how do you become aware of what is unknown? How do you differentiate between a lack of information and an impossible knowledge that depends on experience? One might feel disturbed by a lack of information; one can grow with and through an impossible knowledge. In Farid Matuk’s Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the central nervous system of “I” exceeds oneself. The mirror reflects one person—the formal temperament of a poet arranging these words—just as it expands across languages, cultures, and nations. A collective is formed as a series of “I” statements that necessarily indulge and resist solitude. “No empty space but a transom / Between life and word,” Matuk writes in “Against Occupation.” Embedded in that indulgence, one finds eros; embedded in that resistance, one finds the thresholds knowledge cannot cross. "

— Cleveland Review of Books

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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