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[APPLAUSE]

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Hi y'all.

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A poem must carry a message to
the reader from the impossible.

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All impossibility is,
of course, subjective.

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Your veil is not my veil,
yourself not myself.

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But we do open ourselves
up to the same world.

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And so the poem
carries its message

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from the poet's and the
reader's shared impossibilities.

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And the message isn't read
like instructions for tax forms

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or studied like a lesson.

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Language, like touch,
is a mirrored medium.

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A poem carries its
message to the reader

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with a process that's
less like reading and more

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like making out.

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Not like kissing, not
like with the lips,

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but with the whole mouth, with
the spine, with four lungs,

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and with the self that
does not yet exist

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and will only come into being
after the make out session.

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To read a poem is
to move close enough

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for its breath and your breath
to mingle, for the boundaries

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between self and other to blur.

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You search and savor.

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And likewise, your
interiority becomes

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a space of improvisational
exploration by the poem.

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Attention and language entwine,
tentative, then certain,

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then lost again.

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It is a rehearsal
of vulnerability.

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Time is rhythmic.

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Space is immediate.

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Knowledge and identity
are shared sensations.

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In his wonderful new book,
Moon Mirrored Indivisible,

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Farid Matuk asks what
remains possible of the self

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within empire amid the
pornographic intimacies of wars,

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constant broadcast and
masculinity's bravados of feint

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and retreat.

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It is a book of
simultaneities, each body

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mirrored and marked by
inheritance and surveillance.

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It is a book that concedes to
its own betrayals of speaking,

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lips and breath, compromised
but still speaking out.

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Or, as the opening
poem "Redolent" admits,

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the ground floor of my position
holds no dictionary or science

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that can really
name the flowers.

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The poems live inside the gap
between experience and naming,

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between the self and the
violences and commerces that

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sustain a self.

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The book is a breath
between two faces.

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Matuk's lyric eye is
porous and unstable,

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trembling from the
contamination of witness.

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The self, like the
mouth mid-kiss,

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is both instrument and medium,
the place where contact happens

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and the place where
human experience is

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translated into news and
then cliché and then history.

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The poem before
that confesses how

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shitting to the news video of
a beheading loosens my jaw.

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The private body is
a theater at which

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the world's violence plays.

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Yet also Moon Mirrored
Indivisible is tender.

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Its music is
willowy and patient,

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allowing the reader to learn the
rhythms of its breath and flex.

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Anger is a form of care.

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The book aches for a contact
that might outpace domination.

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Matuk's poems merge colonial
history and domestic space,

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theory and lullaby, sacred
address and bureaucratic jargon.

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In against occupation,
the question arises,

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both pedagogical
and existential,

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how do you know when you're
no longer talking as a person?

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To engage with a poem is to
enter that same uncertainty

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with relish, to allow the
self a momentary dissolve,

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to entwine another
consciousness among your own.

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Farid Matuk is the author of the
poetry collections This Isa Nice

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Neighborhood, The Real Horse,
and his new book, Moon Mirrored

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Indivisible.

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With the visual artist
Nancy Friedemann Sánchez,

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Matuk created the book arts
project Redolent, recipient

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of the 2023 Anna
Rabinowitz Prize

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from the Poetry
Society of America.

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From Spanish, Matuk has
translated Tilsa Otta's

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selected poems, publishing
these under the title

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The Hormone of Darkness.

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He is a professor of
creative writing here

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at the University of Arizona,
and Farid Matuk poems dazzle me.

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They invite an
exploratory closeness,

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unflinching, compassionate,
and implicating.

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To read Matuk's poems is to
press to the lyric what is most

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lyric of yourself, all
the wonders and horrors

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of a self in endless
proximity, like a border

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made infinite by its intimacy.

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His poems are a space
in which there can be,

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for a moment at least, a
reorganizing of the self.

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Please join me in welcoming
Farid Matuk to read.

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[APPLAUSE]

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