You Ask Me To Talk About The Interior

Carolina Ebeid’s voice is a lament, it is a singing, a mourning, a beautiful  and yet sorrow-filled lyric. Her poems—of sons, of husbands, war and flowers, revolution and reading Celan on the subway—are deeply American, while, at the same time, they are not. They are both from everywhere and from nowhere—Ebeid’s voice is both deeply familiar and surprisingly original. These poems are love poems to the world—passionate and essential.

Carolina Ebeid’s You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior is a book of listening and responding and listening again, “the way a searchlight listens over a lake.” Ebeid’s poems recognize that no question is answered completely by the first words spoken in response, nor by the first glimpse of the discovered thing, but that every response, every glimpse, is itself an extension of the initial question—they seek what is to be found there, in the extended question, when the interrogated speaks back, and so they are as wise as any poems I know.

Carolina Ebeid’s mesmerizingly beautiful first book, You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior, is a book of the blues discovered in the matrilineal line. “We live in a copy of Eden,” she writes, “a copy that depends on violence.” Autism, illness, and lead lend their traces to these poems that pulse, like all blues, with “world-sorrow,” while rising from the root of that sorrow which is love. The voice of mother, of lover, and of friend spills from every page, charged with fierce and protective passion, a passion that is contagious because it is song.