The University of Arizona Press
April 25, 2019
Congratulations to poet Farid Matuk, author of collection The Real Horse. He has been named visiting Holloway Professor in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. Farid will occupy the post in the spring of 2020.
The Holloway Series in Poetry is funded through an Endowment made by Roberta C. Holloway in 1981. Each academic year the Holloway Series honors one distinguished poet with a residency at the University of California, Berkeley. Residents teach a semester-long creative writing workshop, are welcomed in the annual fall faculty poetry reading, and give a featured reading in the Holloway Series.
A sustained address to the poet’s daughter, The Real Horse takes its cues from the child’s unapologetic disregard for things as they are, calling forth the adult world as accountable for its flaws and as an occasion for imagining otherwise. Offering a handbook on the possibilities of the verse line, the collection is precise in its figuring, searching in its intellect, and alert in its music. Farid interrogates the confounding intersections of gender, race, class, and national status not as abstract concepts but as foundational intimacies.
