MAGED ZAHER |
A marvelous, locally-based poet (and software ace) who is originally from Cairo, Maged Zaher gives this first full Elliott Bay reading as a kind of sendoff before a trip 'home' to see family and touch base. He is here with a recently published volume of poetry, Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer (Pressed Wafer), a book written in English, but dedicated to the Arabic language. "Maged Zaher is in my view the contemporary writer simultaneously the furthest inside and the most outside the English language as we know it. His texts are intensely casual and bathed in the language of Groupthink and Microsoft, yet deeply thought and rhythmically alluring, which is all the more impressive for the detrius they take on and challenge. Like his near contemporary, Linh Dinh, Zaher can fashion either sentence or line to the point where sublimity and absurdity make a viable erotic couple. If Frank O'Hara has been an Arab and a Coptic Christian living in late capitalist Seattle, he would have been called Maged Zaher." – Leonard Schwartz.
- Street:
- The Elliott Bay Book Company
- Additional:
- 1521 Tenth Avenue
- City:
- Seattle ,
- Province:
- Washington
- Postal Code:
- 98122
- Country:
- United States
