Sugar Break
Maged Zaher
November 2014
We enter life ready for secrets
For example: “God bullies us”
Or “hope is possible”
Or “our muscles will dictate
Our sexual pleasures”
Or “we will never catch infinity
In the act of being infinity”
We will come close to love
And that is about it
His poems are totally alive, funny, sharp, shapely, and never dull.
Wayne Koestenbaum
Sugar Break is a series of poems, accompanied by emails to a nameless lover (or lovers), in which the poet contemplates the possibilities for expressing love and desire within a heavily mediated and constrained language. Sugar Break investigates the borders between thought and feeling, politics and intimacy, sex and Hershey kisses, with an amorous humor that refuses to be silenced by the armored vehicles closing in on all sides. Sugar Break is a special-edition chapbook limited to 300 copies. Proceeds from its sales will be used to fund the reprinting of Maged Zaher’s 2012 UDP title, Thank You For The Window Office.
About the Author
Maged Zaher is the author of Thank You for the Window Office (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), The Revolution Happened and You Didn’t Call Me (Tinfish Press, 2012) and Portrait of the Poet As an Engineer (Pressed Wafer, 2009). His collaborative work with the Australian poet Pam Brown, Farout Library Software, was published by Tinfish Press in 2007. His translations of contemporary Egyptian poetry have appeared in Jacket, Banipal, and Denver Quarterly. His poems have appeared in 6X6, among other journals. He has performed his work at Subtext, Bumbershoot, Chapterhouse, the Kootenay School of Writing, St. Marks Project, Evergreen State College, and The American University in Cairo.
Praise
Maged Zaher is in my view the contemporary writer simultaneously the furthest inside and the most outside the English language as we know it. If Frank O’Hara had been an Arab and a Coptic Christian living in late capitalist Seattle, he would have been called Maged Zaher.
Leonard Schwartz
In the News
Links
Other UDP titles from Maged Zaher here
Publication Details
Chapbook
Saddle-Stitched. 32 pp, 6 x 7 in
Publication Date: November 01 2014
Distribution: Direct Only