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.
This Isa Nice Neighborhood has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2011 Arab American Book Awards, named a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award by the Poetry Society of America, and chosen by Geoffrey G. O'
Language
Place of publication
Product notice
Dimensions
Height: 191 mm
Width: 132 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
ISBN-13
978-0-9815227-5-3 (9780981522753)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), The Real Horse (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and Moon Mirrored Indivisible (University of Chicago Press, 2025). With visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From Spanish, Matuk has translated Tilsa Otta's selected poems, publishing these under the title The Hormone of Darkness (Graywolf Press, 2024). His poems appear in The Paris Review, The Nation, Brooklyn Rail, Bomb magazine, Lana Turner Journal, Poetry magazine, among others, and they have been anthologized most recently in The Best American Experimental Poetry, Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, and the Library of America's Latino Poetry. 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.
