cue: poems [Paperback]

SIWAR MASANNAT is a Jordanian writer, translator, and editor. 50 Water Dreams, her debut collection of poetry, was selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Competition and published in 2015.She is the editor of Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry, a collection of Kwame Dawes's and Chris Abani's introductory essays for the New-Generation African Poetry chapbook box sets. Masannat serves as assistant director of the African Poetry Book Fund and managing editor of the Caribbean Poetry Book Series (Calabash). She teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University.

With cue, Siwar Masannat follows up her prize-winning debut with poems that wrestle with intimacy and distance. Departing from love as a force of creation, cue’s intertextual experiments and lyric poems map environmental relations and pose questions about privacy and visibility, love and family, gender, and ecological agency.

Masannat responds to artist Akram Zaatari’s excavation of studio portraits by Hashem El Madani. Captured between the 1940s and 1970s in the Lebanese town of Saida, El Madani’s photographs are living artifacts of a transnational modernity. They archive performances of gender and romance that seek to circumvent respectability politics. The private-public, then, emerges as a paradox at the heart of cue’s composition. The desire to commune with and re-transmit the photographs and their stories is accompanied by the speaker’s understanding of how visibility may be coopted and how privacy, at once essential and weaponized, is unevenly enjoyed, opportunistically deployed, and systematically encroached upon.

A Jordanian poet considers the cultural nuances of the private-versus-public paradoxAt every turn, this brilliant book exl3)