Farid Matuk, Moon Mirrored Indivisible

  

To stay inside the blind’sslat light, words
Would touch paper, a jar,the smell of the laid upon 

By foundations, the samesteady, wide sunlight 

Cut through at the bottom

By busy diesel routes andmy citizen skin
Walking around dares beheading 

In a recruitmentvideo      Then the outrage comes
To make a story of thetool, 

When it’s just an iterationof sky

Piled with tacticalflight paths (“Perfect Day”)

Itis very good to see a new book by American poet Farid Matuk, his Moon Mirrored Indivisible (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2025), althoughfrustrating to realize I’m a book behind, having missed The Real Horse (TucsonAZ: University of Arizona Press, 2018), but catching This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010) and My Daughter La Chola(Ahsahta Press, 2013). Set in four numbered sections of short, sharp lyrics,Matuk’s poems offer an exactness of first-person exposition and exploration,seeking out points along the long line of experience through the world and howit works, or doesn’t entirely work the way it should. “So, we’re at the edge / Ofthis visibility regime?” writes the six-line poem “Show Up,” “Maybe two inchesback / A little and aging // Against it we’re told to repeat / Our dissonanceand lack of closure [.]” Matuk works through his lyrics writing collision of narrationand image, offering observation and commentary, and the occasional mirror. “Iwant to talk to you about happiness to stay inside it,” opens the poem “BeforeThat,” “But boys displaced by proxy war are falling onto gravel / Outside my window,under the police helicopter’s searchlight // The gravel bites through to theknees; the searchlight is a thing / The bars on the windows are promised to //And the wisdom of the body, like articulations // Of capital through time,means some things / But not others [.]”

Edginghis circle of subject matter beyond the immediate domestic and fatherhood of someof that earlier work, the ripples of this current collection still hold at thatcentral core, but move further out into the world, attempting a declarative staccatoacross a firm lyric, something that has long been present within his work. “PornoClydesdale leadership pony totems,” begins the poem “Form & Freight,” “Onfire    sons would be    Bid us prance / Tamp this scrub grass tocome up    in sparkler light, / Branchinginto three or four points at the ends, every time [.]” In clear tones, Matukarticulates his observations across an increasingly hostile culture, fromwithin an America ramped up in rhetoric, domestic terror and foreign wars, and eventhe purpose of poetry across such divides. “However mannered,” he writes, aspart of “Concentric,” “the poem dares // Write about the poem / I’m fool enoughto say it flattens [.]”