THE REVOLUTION HAPPENED AND YOU DIDN'T CALL ME (Tinfish) by Maged Zaher

1. Dimensions: Very wide and very shot. A cover of bullet holes in a car and car window. Designed by Allison Hanabusa.

2. Design echoes stanzaic structure. One two- to four-line stanza per page. On left pages, left margin has big indent.

3. Compact. Deceptively simple, almost off-hand in feel. But the stanzas creep up on you: isolated. Bits of the everyday integrated with the political and philosophical.

4. Setting: Cairo during the summer and fall of 2011—the uprising. And Seattle. In October. Cairo, again, in February of 2012. Do I detect guilt in some of the Seattle poems?

"With a bicyclist's sense of entitlement, I am touching all the fire hydrants
of the city."

Perhaps I am reading into them. But I think. Consider the implications of revolution, war, and escaping in an airplane to another country.

5.          "Love is mostly a misunderstood exercise: hanging out with quality
        nihilists, everyone is catching up with everyone: bad constitutions drag
        you down."

Love considered as exercise: practice, ritual, a working out and working on. Only to slip into the vernacular, "hanging out." Why "quality" nihilists? Because they have a feel for the complexities, nuances, and ironies of love? Interesting that in a time of revolution he "hangs" with them, or figures them as such, rather than idealists. He puns on "constitutions": a person with a quality physical and psychological constitution does not pull—or hang on—you when hanging out with him or him. Also, the implications of a bad political constitution. Everyday integrated with political. When revolution happens, we also drink tea.

6. Imagery decidedly "postmodern" (he uses the word), and urban: i-phones, microwaves, cafés.

7. "Nationhood is mostly a practice
      Killing demonstrators (for example)
      Or staying up all night
      Sipping tea with reporters"

"Practice" echoes "exercise" from the earlier stanza. Action, habit, ritual, schedule. Off-hand in killing and sipping. We must consider both together. Whorls, layers, complexities, incompatibilities.

8. Humor:

     "In this small corner
       I'm contemplating how to wreck my life"

9. Seattle—Cairo—Airplane—Seattle—Cairo. The elongation of time in travel. The jet lag. The circadian rhythms pulling you in various directions, dimensions. There is no tick-tock: the body gone postmodern amid more refined technologies.

10. What does poetry offer that news cannot? Not simply the everyday struggles of the people of Cairo. Feature stories do that. Rather it is the forming of perception into wrought language and book, bristling with meaning, ambiguity, ambivalence, pain, and celebration. The revolution becomes particular, part of rather than the whole, fragments abound. I think of a moment in Gwendolyn Brooks' poem about Little Rock during desegregation: "They are like people everywhere."

11. Thank you Maged Zaher and publisher Susan M. Schultz for giving us this work of complex beauty: heartbreaking, life affirming, determined.

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See publisher Susan M. Schultz's work under "Nonfiction" in Altered Scale 1.

Mageb Zaher was born and raised in Cario. See his books at Small Press Distribution.