Tahrir Suite: Poems

by Matthew Shenoda

Overview

Winner, Arab American National Museum's 2015 George Ellenbogen Poetry Award

Tahrir Suite is a book-length poem that contemplates immigration, homeland, and diaspora in the twenty-first century. The poem, inspired by recent events in Egypt, cycles through the journey of two Egyptians moving across borders, languages, cultures, landscapes, and political systems while their life in the U.S. diaspora evolves and their home country undergoes revolutionary change.

Written from a perspective and about a place that is virtually unexplored in contemporary American poetry, Tahrir Suite works to capture the complicated essence of what it means to be from a specific place that is experiencing such radical change and how our understandings of “home” and “place” constantly evolve. Tahrir Suite is a musical meditation on what it means to be a global citizen in contemporary times.

  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810130241
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	09/30/2014
Series:	Triquarterly
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Matthew Shenoda is the author of the poetry collections Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone (2009) and Somewhere Else (2005), which won the American Book Award. He is currently Associate Professor and Interim Chair of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Table of Contents

I: The Eruption

II: The Emergence

III: The Migration

IV: The Settling

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

09/29/2014
In this book-length sequence from Shenoda (Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone), "A dictator swallows the clouds for shade/ And the people are left beneath the sun/ As fire rages in their spines." Shenoda merges moments and terms from Egypt's stalled 21st-Century revolution (which began in Cairo's Tahrir Square), archetypes from ancient Egyptian mythology, and even grander visions of cosmic destiny. Three- to five-line stanzas, arranged three per page, follow the quest of a modern-day hero called Tekla (also the name of a Coptic Christian saint), who "could not make himself at home/ Would never understand the distances of heart." Tekla's quest echoes the story of Isis and Osiris, as well as the progress—or regress—of Egypt's revolution. Many stanzas offer stirring but vague political rhetoric: "Justice is the one staff for freedom's flag/ How can we share with the enemy our voice?" Most pages also incorporate pronouncements that could almost have come from papyri: "What becomes of a journey is read in the dust." Some readers will find urgent inspiration. Others may wonder whether Shenoda's disparate materials—at once populist and mystical, topical and eternal, aphoristic and narrative—have, like his traveling heroes and dismayed citizens, not yet found that for which they were looking. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Matthew Shenoda’s stunning third collection, Tahrir Suite, is unlike any other work in contemporary American poetry. This powerful book-length poem embraces poetry’s epic tradition to follow two Egyptians as they migrate from a place where ‘A dictator swallows the clouds for shade / And the people are left beneath the sun’ to the United States, where ‘There will always be a sense of hunger / A yearning to swim in an open sea.’ In his verses, we see the displacement, the longing, and the adjustments that have always been a part of the immigrant paradox. Shenoda’s tightly woven lyric questions the global community and all of its cultural obfuscation, and it is through that questioning that we see the real beauty of the diaspora—its resilience, its unrelenting humanity. This is a timely and necessary poem for a fragmented world full of people in search of a home.”—Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

“Readers in North America ignore a poem like this at the risk of incurring deadly and debilitating ‘Western’ myopia and insularity. Tahrir Suite must be read as poem, allegory, dirge, proclamation, and on some level as a political manifesto: ‘This is a crucial thing / That one cannot live without the threads of dignity / That one cannot live without acceptance / That one cannot live without a sun to guide . . .’ It is a timely text that speaks to world events as we are currently experiencing them.”—Sapphire, author of Push

From the Publisher