This Isa Nice Neighborhood

Can identity be pliant and penetrable? Can the speech act be one of attention over intention, can play and fluidity open onto an ethic? This Isa Nice Neighborhood , Farid Matuk's first full-length collection, says yes. Yes to the rejection of any opposition between politics and aesthetics, between rhetoric and poetics. Yes to vulnerability. Yes to a poetry willing to enact the errors, uncertainties, and tangled complexities of our political, sexual, and social lives. Testing both narrative and lyric, Matuk finds desire at the root of each, a root from which, these poems suggest, compassion and permission grow intertwined.

This Isa Nice Neighborhood has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2011 Arab American Book Awards, named a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award by the Poetry Society of America, and chosen by Geoffrey G. O'