With cue, Siwar Masannat follows up her prize-winning debut with poems that wrestle with intimacy and distance. Departing from love as a force of creation, cue's intertextual experiments and lyric poems map environmental relations and pose questions about privacy and visibility, love and family, gender, and ecological agency.
Masannat responds to artist Akram Zaatari's excavation of studio portraits by Hashem El Madani. Captured between the 1940s and 1970s in the Lebanese town of Saida, El Madani's photographs are living artifacts of a transnational modernity. They archive performances of gender and romance that seek to circumvent respectability politics. The private-public, then, emerges as a paradox at the heart of cue's composition. The desire to commune with and re-transmit the photographs and their stories is accompanied by the speaker's understanding of how visibility may be coopted and how privacy, at once essential and weaponized, is unevenly enjoyed, opportunistically deployed, and systematically encroached upon.
"At every turn, this brilliant book exposes the intersections between science, culture, economics, and spirituality. It is ultimately a radical love poem to that blue day in a world that erases classification and embraces these shapeshifting intersections. And Siwar Masannat, well, '(s)he is (t)here.'"
Brenda Cárdenas
"I finish reading Siwar Masannat's quietly brilliant cue, I close my eyes, I am not alone, I know this is how I'm legible. I hear the voice of cue. It whispers, 'think of the garter snake breaching ground, so shy, think of the chickens jostling their social order, think of bats listening for what your shape sends back (a circle is all the secrets), think of plants growing closer together, then abs
Farid Matuk
"[B]etween story and weave we slight our way in between,' writes Siwar Masannat, whose spare and tender poems invite the reader to look beyond the myriad classifications in which our intimacies are concealed. Masannat's poems deftly enact the title of the collection-they aid memory in retrieving buried details, they gesture at how each body is permitted to move, to express identity, love, desire.
