Hide - by Carolina Ebeid (Paperback)

About the Book

A reinvention of visual poetry and personal history charting exile's impact on memory, identity, and futurity

Book Synopsis

A reinvention of visual poetry and personal history charting exile's impact on memory, identity, and futurity

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.

Review Quotes

"Hide is 'the elsewhere of photographs, ' the skin of memory that cites the soul's movements between Palestine, Iraq, and Cuba--father and mother. Carolina Ebeid's astonishing, meditative cinepoetics is heliotropic across the blood-brain barrier: a glitch that 'has memorized something about radiance.' She tells time by measuring shadows on her grandmother's clothes in a picture. She reads a homeland in a hand on someone's shoulder. She auscultates a dispossession and smells rosemary. 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, author of [...]

About the Author

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.