About this Event
Join Us for the Trident Poetry Series!Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet and author of You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior. She edits poetry at The Rumpus and Visible Binary and is the 2023–2025 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University.
“Carolina Ebeid’s astonishing, meditative cinepoetics is heliotropic across the blood-brain barrier: a glitch that ‘has memorized something about radiance.’ . . . In Hide, you’re reading a film by the artist who transforms the M into meem into ?. Don’t be afraid of the paradise in her ear.”—Fady Joudah
into an index of blue
blue cellophane blue crinoline
spun sugar blue
dissolving on a tongue
Another leap and another down
to touch the bottom through
a glitch band of electric snow
Every sound underwater blooms like iron
—“Home Movie: Maria Jumps into the Pool”
Intellectual and intimate, Carolina Ebeid's Hide gathers shreds of memory, dream, and the ordinary artifacts of diaspora, as the poet casts a sounding line into her patrilineal and matrilineal histories in Palestine and Cuba. With the hum of cassettes and the glow of projectors, these poems superimpose voice upon voice, image upon image, a here upon a there, to disclose the choral noise inside postmemory.
Hide is a restless innovation of form and multimodal expression breaking open words across Arabic, English, and Spanish to release hidden meanings. Poems trace the letter M back to the Phoenician pictograph of waves, while technological “glitches” are portals that summon oracular voices across the family archive. In swirling “spell” poems, Ebeid conjures Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, whose Siluetas write the human shape upon the earth.
Ebeid’s title is prismatic: Hide as in concealment, as in animal skin, as in to secret oneself away. Hide commands attention like a whispering voice, prompting readers to lean in, to listen for transmissions from ancestors and futurity both.
Rajiv Mohabir:
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of five books of poetry, the latest is Seabeast (Four Way Books 2025). His books have been awarded gold in Forward Indies and Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His other honors include being finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Publishing Triangle Award for Poetry and Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature. His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets. Currently he teaches poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Book Blurb from Publishers:
Organized as an alphabetical bestiary, Seabeast lyrically catalogues whale species by common name and behaviors, resulting in a poetic compendium that defies pathetic fallacy even as it sings the similarities between homo sapiens and the marine mammoths that have long captured our fascination. In his fifth full-length collection, Rajiv Mohabir winds together the threads of cetacean evolution, natural history, animal migration, and human culture and colonization as they concern the endurance of all species. In anthropomorphizing these complex mammals, Mohabir argues, we overwrite and erase their sublime difference and selfhood, their distinct and separate experience of embodiment; yet, in refusing to recognize the familiarities of whale behavior and social patterns, we subjugate these magnificent creatures, affirming a hierarchy that establishes anything inhuman as inherently less than human and enabling cruelty toward all manner of living things.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Trident Booksellers and Cafe, 940 Pearl Street, Boulder, United States
USD 0.00
