Profound in its sincerity, MOON MIRRORED INDIVISIBLE is a poetry collection that threatens to leave your mind forever percolating. I already can not wait for future me to re-read it. Farid Matuk’s writing cadence is natured, almost subdued, and artfully capsizes its themes of reflection, fascism, self-determination, queerness, and more. I think it will take a lot of time and copious re-reading to put such a superb work into words. I would recommend to fans of Omar Sakr, Sally Wen Mao, and Justin Phillip Reed!

make sense of what we are against how we’re being Othered. We might have an idea of self but it’s difficult to separate what is ours and what is theirs. Farid Matuk’s Moon Mirrored Indivisible creates a poetry collection out of these arguments of selfhood. 

In gender and queer theory, it’s posited that we are constructs of everything we are exposed to from birth, especially when it comes to sexuality and gender presentation. In race studies, we’re told that code-switching is particularly prevalent among people of color—a chameleonic exercise that forces those Othered to shift into a hegemonic idea of what is socially acceptable in very specific situations. Matuk reflects on queer desire as something you carry from childhood into adulthood in “To One’s Honor” as a sensual amalgam of experiences and histories, which as a Syrian and Peruvian man in the US brings a lot of baggage. In “Arts & Craft” the writer places the formation of masculinity and therefore femininity through a queer lens as well as generational trauma. Everything affects everything. Cause and effect. Reality is reflected back at you for you to make of it what you want.

Reflections take over most of the collection. Its titular poem (“Moon Mirrored Indivisible”) takes the mirroring metaphor that runs throughout the book and tells the reader that the reflection is not just exterior, but interior. “Magnificat Mirror Petition” reiterates that you can’t ask the reflection to show something that wasn’t already there—it’s the law of conservation of mass; it cannot be created or destroyed, it just shifts into different shapes out of what was already there: “It won’t be a story unless I make it that / With words being mirrors / And the transit back through their reflections” (from “Exvocation”). 

Eyes are also mirrors of our every day, trying to parse out the universe’s messages: what are we witnesses to that will spark something already within us. A change, but not an external addition, just a new understanding of self. 

The book’s also a meditation on being perceived: by family, by the state, by the reader. Who gets to analyze what we are, who we’ve been? As poets, we struggle with how personal is too personal. We try to create distance between art and artist and constantly fail, because how could we not bring ourselves into our art? “Having been seen / Comes with its own annotations” (from “The Moon in Cancer”). Even his own epigraphs point in this direction—see Fady Joudah’s quote at the beginning: “But I’m closer to you / than you are to yourself / And this, my enemy friend / Is the definition of distance.”

Matuk turns the mirror on empire and shows the reader the violence and utter “nothing” to an oppressed people. Constantly trying to show humanity amidst the wondrous mundane. Though at times difficult to parse through, when you get to the meat and bones of the collection you find yourself and the poet standing side by side looking into a mirror and asking: when is it enough? When are we enough?

Thanks to University of Chicago Press for having the collection available on Edelweiss and later approving an ARC for me on NetGalley!