Matuk, Farid: The Real Horse

University of Arizona Press, paperback Publication Date: February 27, 2018 Publisher Marketing: A sustained address to the poet's daughter, The Real Horse takes its cues from the child's unapologetic disregard for things as they are, calling forth the adult world as accountable for its flaws and as an occasion for imagining otherwise. Offering a handbook on the possibilities of the verse line, this collection is precise in its figuring, searching in its intellect, and alert in its music. Here lyric energy levitates into constellations that hold their analytic composure, inviting readers into a shared practice of thinking and feeling that interrogates the confounding intersections of gender, race, class, and national status not as abstract concepts but as foundational intimacies. Matuk's interrogations of form cut a path through the tangle of a daughter's position as a natural-born female citizen of the "First World" and of the poet's position as a once-undocumented immigrant of mixed e