Farid Matuk
He // Him // His, They // Them // Theirs
[ID: 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.]
Portrait photo by Roberto “Bear” Guerra.
Tucson, AZ
2024 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by the Poetry Foundation.
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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.
[Excerpt]
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 the sleep and all the faces
That afflict – laid low, I could be the paper
They ravish or remember and the end of their script