Keynote
A reinvention of visual poetry and personal history charting exile’s impact on memory, identity, and futurity
Book Title
Hide
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “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
Poem Excerpt
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”
Body
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.
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.
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About the Author
Credit: Maddy B Creates
Upcoming Events
Carolina Ebeid reading and in conversation about HIDE with Jeffrey Pethybridge at Amherst College
Date:
Location:
Amherst College in Amherst, MAview map
This event is free and open to the public. Find more information here.
Praise
- “In Carolina Ebeid’s Hide, the words are warning flowers that feel the failures of our world by revealing themselves to be entirely responsive, adaptable, as if each seed syllable were its own telepathy machine that holds the beauty and wonder of this world up to our faces.”—Eleni Sikelianos
- “In Hide, memory is excavated and reassembled until ‘it begins to waste / like a bar of soap // turned in your hand.’ What remains in the silence after image and its negatives are woven and unwoven in the American English, Palestinian Arabic, and Cuban Spanish? Ebeid’s poems are at once spare and charged, humming to the reader.”—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
- “Carolina Ebeid dissolves the borders constraining poetry, invites us to swim together in the dissolution and glimpse what it might make possible. This is a book of deep and abiding mystery, beckoning us toward the moments ‘when terror breaks / into something brighter.’ Hide makes a new home for ancestors both given and chosen.”—Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
- “Ebeid’s poems, with their arresting intellect and gossamer music, have that strange magic of a tale told centuries ago, handed down through the thorny ganglia of family trees uprooted by migration, war, and unsettling resettlement. Hide has taken up a ‘red residence’ in my head.”—Divya Victor
