The Way of the Earth
A lyrical collection examines the quotidian beauty that surrounds us despite deep loss and climate crisis.
This gorgeous book is full of captivating description and introspective wisdom.
—Publishers Weekly
The Way of the Earth is the fourth collection from award-winning poet Matthew Shenoda. In this, his most personal collection to date, he explores the temporal and fleeting nature of human life and the earth we inhabit. Through ruminations on the intersections of culture and ecology, the death of loved ones, and the growing inequities in our midst, Shenoda explores what it means to be a person both grounded to the earth and with a yearning beyond it. Memories of landscapes and histories echo throughout the sensations of the present: the sight of egrets wading in the marshes, the smell of the ocean, a child’s hand nestled in a warm palm. “Time never goes back,” Shenoda writes, “but the imagination must.”
—TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press
“These poems meditate on fragments of memory that make up life. A door is cracked, a window, letting in the whole of the world where ‘all the ways of knowing have never added up to a single whole. A birdcall is a birdcall.’ In moments that recall the loss of a child and ask us to witness grief, we are also asked to find a way beyond pain. These poems are prayers against sorrow, and as Shenoda writes they are what might lead us, even if only for a moment, to the sacred.”
—Dorianne Laux, author of Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
“Out of this quiet, meditative work something prayerful as attention emerges and fills my lives with deepest feeling. I am awakened into wonder by this voice made of root and wind and waters, glinting with memory, all time touching inside it.”
—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria
Find & Purchase:
Bearden's Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden
Borrowing from Romare Bearden’s aesthetic palette and inspired by his Odysseus series, Bearden’s Odyssey gathers, for the first time, poems from thirty-five of the most revered African diaspora poets in the United States. Poetic echoes come forth in themes of inspiration with historical intersections of one of the greatest visual artists of the twentieth century.
The award-winning editors, Kwame Dawes and Matthew Shenoda, assemble an esteemed literary congregation, with original poems by Chris Abani, Rita Dove, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Ed Roberson, Aracelis Girmay, Yusef Komunyakaa, and more. With a powerful foreword by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and stunning visual reproductions of select Bearden masterpieces, this anthology fuses art and literature, standing as a testament to Romare Bearden’s power and influence in the contemporary artistic world.
- TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press
“When people talk of the great American artists I am irritated that they hardly mention Bearden. His name should be called along with people like Pollock—as he was clearly one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century.”
— Derek Walcott
“Bearden’s Odyssey is a powerful exercise in coherence—a bringing together of text and image, a negotiation of identities. The collection opens new paths by which to explore Bearden’s most emblematic paintings. It will bring new audiences to both poetry and visual art.”
—Jennifer Benka, executive director, Academy of American Poets
Find & Purchase:
Tahrir Suite
Winner of the Arab American Book Award
Tahrir Suite contemplates immigration, homeland and diaspora in the 21st century. The poem cycles through the journey of two Egyptians moving across borders, languages, cultures, landscapes and political systems while their life in the U.S. diaspora evolves and their home country undergoes revolutionary change.
Written from a perspective and about a place that is virtually unexplored in contemporary American poetry, Tahrir Suite works to capture the complicated essence of what it means to be from a specific place that is experiencing such radical change and how our understandings of "home" and "place" constantly evolve. Tahrir Suite is a musical meditation on what it means to be a global citizen in contemporary times.
- TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press
Matthew Shenoda’s stunning third collection, Tahrir Suite, is unlike any other work in contemporary American poetry. This powerful book-length poem embraces poetry’s epic tradition to follow two Egyptians as they migrate from a place where “A dictator swallows the clouds for shade / And the people are left beneath the sun” to the United States, where “There will always be a sense of hunger / A yearning to swim in an open sea.” In his verses, we see the displacement, the longing, and the adjustments that have always been a part of the immigrant paradox. Shenoda’s tightly woven lyric questions the global community and all of its cultural obfuscation, and it is through that questioning that we see the real beauty of the diaspora—its resilience, its unrelenting humanity. This is a timely and necessary poem for a fragmented world full of people in search of a home.
—Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke
Readers in North America ignore a poem like this at the risk of incurring deadly and debilitating ‘Western’ myopia and insularity. Tahrir Suite must be read as poem, allegory, dirge, proclamation, and as on some level a political manifesto: “This is a crucial thing / That one cannot live without the threads of dignity / That one cannot live without acceptance / That one cannot live without a sun to guide . . .” it is a timely text that speaks to world events as we are currently experiencing them.
—Sapphire, author of Push
Find & Purchase:
Indie Bound
Powell's
Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Northwestern University Press
Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone
Weaving narratives of ancient and contemporary Egypt while exploring ecological shifts of the Nile Valley, Matthew Shenoda is a voice at the crossroads of the African continent and its diasporas. Amiri Baraka says, “Matthew Shenoda’s poetry will open your mind to another world that exists inside and outside of your own.” Winner of the 2006 American Book Award for his debut collection, Somewhere Else, Shenoda is a younger poet with his eyes set on the larger issues of history, politics, and culture.
-BOA Editions Ltd.
”No poet exercises the healing powers of poetry like Shenoda, whose verse reads like prayer, incantation--the soothing words of hope to mend a damaged world. In this book, the Coptic Egyptian poet returns to his cultural roots and the legacy of strength so necessary to confront the hostilities against entire communities because of language, nationhood or religion. “
– Rigoberto Gonzalez, National Book Critics Circle
“A poet with deep roots in a dozen worlds, Matthew Shenoda is also a deft and savvy storyteller whose voice can't be everywhere soon enough. In the tenderly explosive Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone, he seems to be privy to some parallel universe ruled by lush, pinpoint lyricism--and those who pick up this slim volume will be utterly grateful for his unerring eye and enviable ability to turn even a small stanza into a song.”
– Patricia Smith
“Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone insists that there is mystery in the quotidian of our lives; there is no sense in resisting these poems. Matthew Shenoda uses a quiet language to bring some of the most striking lyrical intensity one will ever read. Like any of our most important poets, he understands that what needs to be said with the most passion comes to us in a whisper. He translates with spiritual wisdom the still moments we ignore and the cacophonies we make. “
– A. Van Jordan
Find & Purchase:
Somewhere Else
Winner of the American Book Award
Somewhere Else, rooted in the traditions of the Coptic community, widens the political conversation surrounding ethnicity, pan-Africanism, and pan-Arabism. From the teeming streets of Cairo to the urban United States, from Egypt’s indigenous, pre-Islamic Coptic society to an America struggling with its fear of the Arab world, Shenoda’s collection spans generational and cultural divides. In poems both personal and political, he celebrates his Coptic heritage, riffs on jazz and hip-hop, and offers a nuanced and energized perspective virtually unknown in the West.
-Coffee House Press
"I turn the corner of this honor-driven book, find memory beneath our doors, taste the blessings of his midwifery, his miracle songs giving birth to un-ghosted rooms..."
– Sonia Sanchez, from the Introduction
"Matthew Shenoda's Somewhere Else is today's poetry--filled with the immediacy of contemporary concerns of the diasporic identity…the words of a felt wisdom of cross-cultural and cross-generational dialogue are liberally strewn throughout this volume."
– African American Review
“These papyrus-dipped poems launch the Eastern desert into the ‘Forever-West’ where we all dwell. Listen to Shenoda’s ‘giraffe tongue’ unwind—incantations reclaiming the Coptic earth and its peoples, stories and sufferings, a grandmother and grandfather’s lessons of war, death, rebirth, love and peace. This book holds the keys to our present global predicament— each word is a star in our night.”
—Juan Felipe Herrera
Find & Purchase:
