Hide
Poems
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
A reinvention of visual poetry and personal history charting exile’s impact on memory, identity, and futurity
Intellectual and intimate, Carolina Ebeid's Hide gathers shreds of memory, dream, and the ordinary artifacts of diaspora, as the poet casts a sounding line into her patrilineal and matrilineal histories in Palestine and Cuba. With the hum of cassettes and the glow of projectors, these poems superimpose voice upon voice, image upon image, a here upon a there, to disclose the choral noise inside postmemory.
Hide is a restless innovation of form and multimodal expression breaking open words across Arabic, English, and Spanish to release hidden meanings. Poems trace the letter M back to the Phoenician pictograph of waves, while technological “glitches” are portals that summon oracular voices across the family archive. In swirling “spell” poems, Ebeid conjures Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, whose Siluetas write the human shape upon the earth.
Ebeid’s title is prismatic: Hide as in concealment, as in animal skin, as in to secret oneself away. Hide commands attention like a whispering voice, prompting readers to lean in, to listen for transmissions from ancestors and futurity both.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Divided into four sections, the meditative sophomore volume from Ebeid (You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior) draws from the heritages of her Palestinian father and Cuban mother. In "Ghazal over Waves," the repeated word wave captures the rhythm and motions of displacement, "North we go. North by fishing boat, by plane, by truck, by hot-air balloon. Look down at the waves./ Blue-violet North of shorter wavelengths, shorter attention spans—call out, call out and wave." The entries weave memory, voices, places, and languages (Arabic, English, and Spanish) in spare lines that reflect on expression, art, and family history. "She Got Love: A Circle of Spells for Ana Mendieta" evokes the eponymous Cuban American artist in a poem comprised of lines arranged in circles, while "Autochthonous Silueta" begins, "The camera records Ana Mendieta kneeling/ beside her earth-body sculpture, concave dug-/ out of her self, hollow suspicion of a person." It adds up to a memorable and skillful excavation of identity and inheritance.
