Tahrir Suite

“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