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A black-and-white portrait of a middle-aged Syrian-Peruvian man with buzzed salt-and-pepper hair and mustache. He is wearing an Oxford button-down shirt and gazes out beyond the frame.

Photo by Roberto “Bear” Guerra.

Artists

Farid Matuk

He // Him // His
They // Them // Theirs

Poet and Writer

Tucson, Arizona

The entanglement that drives my work is political because it orients us away from ideas of an integrated, singular subjecthood and toward a sense of being that is mutually created and cared for.”
Born in Lima, Peru to a Peruvian father and Syrian mother, and preemptively kidnapped to escape his father’s violence, Farid Matuk has lived in the US since the age of six as an undocumented person, then a “legal” resident, and eventually as a “naturalized” citizen. Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. Their poems have appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, The Paris Review, and Poetry, among others. Matuk’s work has been supported with residencies and grants from the Headlands Center for the Arts and with a Holloway Visiting Professorship at UC Berkeley. Redolent, their book-arts collaboration with artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, won the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Matuk’s translation of Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness is forthcoming in 2024 from Graywolf Press.

Donor -This award was generously supported by the Poetry Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 08.13.2024

Mimesis

Thinnest sliver
New moon light

At the horn tips of mule deer
Turned toward us

Their dark eyes don't know
Our dry heels imitate the mountains

"Women imitate the earth"

House finches, quaking,
Imitate chambers

Like Daniel's prints saying, freedom

without love posted at the outskirts
Men wield mirrors at men

Making of each other's baby
Spun 'round

While the rest of us stay in bed

And in our closed eyes sense the touch
Of light is a given to use
If we feel like it

We will get up
In a movie about us

We'll go to a lower desert
Only the thinnest air in our way

Released, certain moods will flare

Our mouths saying,
"Suppose one is bred an immigrant"
Citrus groves having been husbanded

Somewhere behind you
And you don't get too precious

Like things are very small, really

They just turn over
And get lost

Across several versions of the portrait
Ragged edged, the mirror
Its useful mercury

Sonorous behind the glass, almost a return
Before first light assembles the blue

Then what can we tell?

That we took an accent

From a dialect that never made it
Down the mountains

That we know how to get thin

And turn, saying, "I'm not
really interested in my affect"

However mannered,
"Uh-huh,"
The poem says back

Poem by Farid Matuk.

CREASE

Both the actual horse on fire and its event out of these words

Folded back through love

Trying not to be with but of

Like my friend Jeannie, the artist who fucked photographic paper

Creased into petals around the trace of that touch

If I can concentrate on such sex art time

To crease the outside’s infinite regress,

When I’m dying

Actual dying will be a fold about a flower fallen? I know everyone wanted

Their stupid church high on a hill, but my favorite things –

Happy things I thought drifting down into sleep and all the faces

That afflict – laid low, I could be the paper

They ravish or remember and the end of their script

Poem by Farid Matuk.