CAIRO the undelivered letters

<p>In CAIRO: the undelivered letters the city speaks-but only through those the world forgets. Framed as a haunting series of letters to an absent editor at Al-Ahram Newspaper's Friday Mail this extraordinary poetry collection refracts the lives of Cairo's demimonde through a surreal shimmering lens. From flooded basements to rooftop vigils from broken radios to whispered revolutions each plea is a cracked mirror reflecting a city unraveling and remaking itself in silence. In the void where replies should be CAIRO: the undelivered letters dares to imagine that even unread voices echo-tender urgent and impossible to ignore.</p><p></p><p>I could not help but think of Jack Spicer's<em> After Lorca</em> another brilliant book of epistolary poems while reading <em>CAIRO: the undelivered letters</em>; and what Spicer says of perfect poetry that it 'has infinitely small vocabulary.' </p><p>-Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge <em>A Treatise on Stars</em> (New Directions 2020) a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. </p><p></p><p></p>