Book Review

Jordanian poet Siwar Masannat’s Cue (University of Georgia Press, 2024) is a finely wrought and complex hybrid work. Its ekphrastic poetry is in conversation with artist Akram Zaatari and his “excavation” of photographer Hashem El Madani’s portraits, taken in Lebanon in the 1940s to the 1970s, which depict heteronormative family, same-sex portraits, and physical affection. Cue includes photographs, excerpts from Zaatari’s commentary, erasure of excerpts of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, untranslated Arabic, and borrowed text from and allusions to a diversity of sources, including Etel Adnan, Emily Dickinson, Joy Harjo, Lorine Niedecker, Don Mee Choi, Ibn ‘Arabi, Alain Badiou, Dunya Mikhail, several films, and stories from a queer community organization in Lebanon, among many others. The poetry takes many forms—field composition, couplets, prose, erasure—and is written primarily, unassumingly, in lower case lettering. Cue demonstrates adept hybridity and complexity, not unlike Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée or Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, which are among my favorite works. Divided in two parts, it lingers on questions about binaries, visibility, privacy, identity, gender, interconnectedness, and the ways society pressures the many answers to such intimate questions.

As a reader, I am not deeply familiar with many of Cue’s complex threads—for example, I do not know several of the artistic references Masannat skillfully weaves together, I do not speak or read Arabic, I do not have the lived experience of queerness in the Middle East, nor have I experienced the historical and cultural backdrop against which El Madani’s portraits were taken or are now being seen (Masannat does discuss this in the preface). That said, even before I explored these topics further and used my Google Translate app to read the Arabic text, I was taken by Cue’s lyric sensibilities. Throughout the first part of the book, Masannat converses with El Mandani, Zaatari, and the photos using nature images and metaphor to explore themes of disguise and disavowal (which Masannat fascinatingly points out are linguistically related concepts in Arabic) within society and family. For example, Masannat introduces El Mandani’s photograph of a shirtless 1960s bodybuilder with the italicized monostich “I want to be genderless,” and a few pages later reflects on the ways this identity stayed hidden:

spellbound, when we spoke at

all we spoke in code, mouthed

out pomegranates—broken

seeds snapping out of the gates

of our yellowing teeth.

our shadows each

grew plump in longing. we

befriended them and ourselves.

Animal imagery figures prominently throughout Cue. Of chickens, Masannat writes, “like people, chickens climb and descend / ranks, consort, switch, / and flip and flap and extend // flightless wings. like / people, they get // occasionally peckish.” This metaphor extends poignantly to a reflection on identity, as a few pages later, the speaker says:

my hen mother did not

know I was a two-yolk egg,

did not foresee my shell

ripping her open.

The hen mother is injured by laying such a large “two-yolk egg” (which a reader can imagine as a queer child) and the “bleeding chicken chased by / rest of chickens pecking her eating from her flesh until she dies.” This disavowal, repudiation even, of the hen mother by the group for the identity of her offspring may speak to the risks of societal judgement, which Masannat deftly draws into focus:

we are

(t)here from birth

to self as outside

pulled into what opposite

the ring and roll of

we tongue skin lick

chicken true

to the bone and perverse

our fingers of dead meat

When describing photographs, when engaging in intertextual excavations of their many meanings, and even when interrogating science and society, Masannat weaves in a direct address between a distinct speaker and an addressee who demonstrate love and desire between them. In Masannat’s caption of a 1950s photograph of two men in Lebanon, Najm and Asmar, posed as bride and groom, the speaker is reminded by the pair’s physical affection of a similar intimacy the speaker shared with the addressee:

whereas asmar here is the true melancholy center of the photograph—star of a

delicate, plastic flowering—najm’s soft lean into him is as tender as i recollect

your hands: gentle, warm—generous on my knee.

This relationship, layered upon the excavation of the portraits, amongst the erasure of Foucault’s The Order of Things (eschewing categorization), and within scientific metaphors, adds a warmth to the work’s intellectual and lyrical intricacy.

In the second part of Cue, Masannat continues to connect human and non-human experience. Spanning the entire second part, the poem “a plan(e)t—” employs italicized language from an essay by evolutionary biologist Bernd Roßlenbroich and alludes to the work of eighteenth-century priest and biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani. “a plan(e)t—” interweaves allusions to evolution with images of emotional and physical boundaries, thin as membranes or hair, and notions of love and destruction. Through spare and concise phrasing across pages that breathe with white space, Masannat shows humans as part of the natural environment, including our most destructive instincts. This results in a quietly powerful poem that zooms in and out from micro to macro asking, how different is a plant from a planet? What does it mean that “we are specialized in plan(e)t / deaths,” that we (humans, wolves, bats, orchids) are “kin”?

Masannat’s ability to represent complex continuums instead of binaries—public-private, seen-unseen, human-environment, male-female, English-Arabic—makes Cue a successful meditation on intimacy, connection, and the many ways binaries are false. It is a worthy read even for those who, like me, do not have familiarity with its many compelling allusions. Any reader may appreciate Masannat’s gorgeous mosaic of visual and textual elements which encourage us to consider the many intricate connections layered within.