Farid Matuk, Moon Mirrored Indivisible

  

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

By foundations, the same steady, wide sunlight 

Cut through at the bottom

By busy diesel routes and my citizen skin
Walking around dares beheading 

In a recruitment video      Then the outrage comes
To make a story of the tool, 

When it’s just an iteration of sky

Piled with tactical flight paths (“Perfect Day”)

It is very good to see a new book by American poet Farid Matuk, his Moon Mirrored Indivisible (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2025), although frustrating to realize I’m a book behind, having missed The Real Horse (Tucson AZ: 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 how it works, or doesn’t entirely work the way it should. “So, we’re at the edge / Of this visibility regime?” writes the six-line poem “Show Up,” “Maybe two inches back / A little and aging // Against it we’re told to repeat / Our dissonance and lack of closure [.]” Matuk works through his lyrics writing collision of narration and image, offering observation and commentary, and the occasional mirror. “I want to talk to you about happiness to stay inside it,” opens the poem “Before That,” “But boys displaced by proxy war are falling onto gravel / Outside my window, under the police helicopter’s searchlight // The gravel bites through to the knees; 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 [.]”

Edging his circle of subject matter beyond the immediate domestic and fatherhood of some of that earlier work, the ripples of this current collection still hold at that central core, but move further out into the world, attempting a declarative staccato across a firm lyric, something that has long been present within his work. “Porno Clydesdale leadership pony totems,” begins the poem “Form & Freight,” “On fire    sons would be    Bid us prance / Tamp this scrub grass to come up    in sparkler light, / Branching into three or four points at the ends, every time [.]” In clear tones, Matuk articulates his observations across an increasingly hostile culture, from within an America ramped up in rhetoric, domestic terror and foreign wars, and even the purpose of poetry across such divides. “However mannered,” he writes, as part of “Concentric,” “the poem dares // Write about the poem / I’m fool enough to say it flattens [.]”