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So I'm very honored
to be up here

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and to be introducing
Farid Matuk.

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And we are very lucky to be
here in Arizona, and that Farid

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is here with us.

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I'm going to just get some of
the biographical information

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out first before I
talk about his work.

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Farid Matuk is the author of
This Isa Nice Neighborhood

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from Letter Machine, and My
Daughter La Chola from Ahsahta

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just this year.

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This Isa Nice Neighborhood
earned honorable mention

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in the 2011
Arab-American Book Award

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and was a finalist for the
Norma Farber First Book Award.

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And the Poetry
Society of America

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included it in the New
American Poets series.

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Matuk's translation from Spanish
appear in several journals

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and anthologies.

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His poems appear in Third
Coast, Black Warrior Review,

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Iowa Review, Poets.org,
The Baffler and others.

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He serves as a
contributing editor

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for the Volta, poetry
editor for Fence,

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and teaches in the
MFA program here

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at the University of Arizona.

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If a poetry can be
against anything,

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I would propose that,
Farid Matuk's poetry

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is a poetry that situates
itself against narcissism.

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It's a poetry that stands
firmly across from the isolated

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eye and the narcissistic body.

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David Foster Wallace, in
an interview for Die Zeit,

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said, "The cruel thing with
depression and narcissism

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is that it's such a
self-centered illness.

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The depression is painful.

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You're sapped,
consumed by yourself.

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The worse the
depression, the more

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you just think about
yourself and the stranger.

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And the more repellent
you appear to others."

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In Matuk's work,
however, one finds a body

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and a voice that reaches
out beyond its privileged

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self-centered identity.

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A body and
simultaneous connection

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and collision with others,
with objects and the material

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of the world, with
the darnings of terror

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of history and the present.

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This is a poetry that swirls
out of the enclosed self,

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the self-referential, into
a maelstrom of provocation

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and revenance.

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Geoffrey O'Brien who selected
Matuk's first full-length book,

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This Isa Nice Neighborhood for
the New American Poet series

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says, "Like the simultaneously
glowing phrases projected

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at neighborhoods,
Matuk's eye and today

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wander through perceiving
centers and their inflections

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by class, race, and country.

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And don't do so to isolate
some corporate human essence,

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but to track the interactions
of different persons,

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and the tragic and gratifying
outcomes of those encounters.

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Matuk extends his
poetic reach out

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to the personas that contain no
easy or simple cultural labels.

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He explores the gray
margins of identities

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that include immigrant,
woman, child, father, tourist,

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boy, American, suburbanite,
subordinate, mother, white,

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black, Hispanic, Arab, and more.

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And always, there's
a willingness

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to inhabit the fury and
violence within those margins,

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and a willingness
to inhabit love."

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The poems in Matuk's new
chapbook, My Daughter La Chola,

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show virtuosity of
language and form

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that carried this mission
further, and even more deeply.

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Through the birth
of his daughter,

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he locates an evolution
of human perception

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as it develops inside a
child who becomes not Matuk's

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daughter, but all daughters.

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Becomes not child, but poet.

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Becomes perception itself.

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Matuk writes, "Call to me,
the one among your names

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that opens beneath you, intimate
as your next thought cymballing

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on the shore."

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Matuk, the father and
poet takes instruction

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from the child's ability to
inhabit space and language

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and persona as yet
uninhibited by expectation

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and cultural regimes.

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He, like the child, points
to the passing body.

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As poems form, the child
forms as the accumulation

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of simultaneities, the
branching of the human mind,

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and by extension, the poet.

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Matuk himself in an
essay on his poetics

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that appears in the Volta, talks
about a language that quote,

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"serves to simultaneously
wound and heal the membrane

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where we experience the
world, that we are doubled

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and estranged from
ourselves and the address,

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even while such address makes us
available to a shared history.

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Where in the child there's
little irony in the father,

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the mother, the
poet, with multiple

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genders identities
and histories.

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Looking back and watching
the child, there's creation,

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and there is terror.

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My daughter La Chola becomes
my daughter all possible.

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In its insistence on
the simultaneous grief,

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tyranny, and humanity
of the world."

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Let's welcome Farid Matuk.

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