"Blue" reminisces with the past but also reconciles the reality of living in Oxford, Mississippi, in the middle of the pandemic. I envisioned home with the lens that is getting used to a new landscape. In those days, I relied upon prayers I've known all my life, I relied on music I loved, but during the isolation, I discovered many more songs in languages I wish I could pray in.
Hussain Ahmed on "Blue" |
|
|
What Sparks Poetry: Farid Matuk on Language as Form
"I wanted this work to be accountable, to not settle for easy truisms about ambiguity or a lack of closure being liberatory or even interesting. I wanted, more than I had before, to risk being right or wrong or foolish or earnest or stylized. I don't know who to face, but in wanting to be accountable the poems call—a bit desperately, really—to readers I can't yet see. My ambition was to create across each poem and again across the book a complex of feelings, sometimes contradictory feelings, that would get at what's irreconcilable about the real." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
