Customer Reviews

Zodiac of Echoes

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Kaleidescopic in structure and movement, daringly personal yet intensely political, his verse encompasses narrative, satire, meditation, and high-spirited hilarity. One moment, we're stuck in a highway on the way to the history-glutted Mississippi river. The next, questions of exile, identity, and linguistic alienation spiral in a poem set in a jaunty Cairo taxi ride. Line by line we turn from zany wisecracks about globalization to solemn invocations of the moon, from intensely felt lyricism to splintered, televisual, attention-franctured deferrals of feeling. . . These dazzling lyrics and sequences create one of the most compelling portraits we have of a mind, a sensibility, a language emerging from the hybridization of cultures-Jahan Ramazani

With ZODIAC OF ECHOES, Khaled Mattawa has done it again (if you haven't read ISMALIA ECLIPSE, you must!), offering readers an intimate glimpse at foreign worlds, as well as new ways of looking at our own. He is one of those gifted poets whose words need only be read once to reverberate in memory for a lifetime. Ah, but then you read them again and again for the simple pleasure of them. Bravo!