Join the Black Mountain Institute for a virtual conversation with Farid Matuk on the poet’s latest collection Moon Mirrored Indivisible (2025) and his craft. As Matuk reinforces the relationship between the lyrical and the political, poetry becomes a place of resistance. How can elements of poetry be in conversation with socio-political and historical realities? How does sound in poetry speak to desire, forming what Roque Raquel Salas Rivera calls “languaged pleasure”? Can poetry be a medium for a multitude of identities? How does the real inform art, and artifice, the real? This conversation will seek answers to these questions based on Matuk’s work. Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), The Real Horse (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and Moon Mirrored Indivisible (University of Chicago Press, 2025). With artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Matuk is also the translator of Tilsa Otta’s selected poems, The Hormone of Darkness (Graywolf Press, 2024). Matuk’s work has been supported by the Headlands Center for the Arts, a Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship. Hüseyin S. Arıkan is a poet, translator, and a veteran MUNer from Türkiye. Before joining UNLV as an MFA student, he worked at K-12 schools in Las Vegas and Henderson. His debut, Bin Dün Var Yarında (trans. A Thousand Yesterdays Tomorrow), received the Seyhan Erozcelik First Poetry Collection Award in 2019. He’s a jazz fusion enthusiast and a latecomer to the cat lovers society. Hüseyin received his undergraduate degree in Political Science from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Türkiye.
Farid Matuk reads poems from his collection Moon Mirrored Indivisible (2025), considering themes of masculinity, state violence, and racism. He closes with a poem by Susan Briante, with whom this reading was originally given.
Hannelore Quander-Rattee Works-in-Translation Reading: Tilsa Otta and Farid Matuk
Welcome to the rile* book podcast, an archival space for the readings and conversations we host at our space in Brussels. For this episode we have the pleasure of sharing the recording of a reading by US based poet Farid Matuk reading from his forthcoming collection Moon Mirrored Indivisible. It was followed by a conversation with Brussel based writer Filip Jakab. The event took place on June 15, 2024.
The poems explore the aesthetic perversions of syntax and rhyme to search for yet unrealized perversions and purities amidst national, sexual, and ancestral orthodoxies.
Translation reading with Juan Felipe Herrera, University of Arizona Poetry Center
Poet Chris Martin curates this week's Radical Poetry Reading, featuring verse from Hannah Emerson, Adam Wolfond, Lauren Russell, and Farid Matuk
Oral History Interview with Farid Matuk, interviewed by Jahan Khajavi, Julian Samora Library, Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame
