Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya in 1964 and immigrated to the U.S. in his teens. He is the author of three previous books of poetry, Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow, 1995), Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable, 2003), and Amorisco (Ausable, 2008). Mattawa has translated eight volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry and co-edited two anthologies of Arab American literature. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA translation grant, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the PEN American Center Poetry Translation Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in the MFA (Creative Writing) Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. (Author photo by Amanda Abel)
"In his masterful fourth collection, Khaled Mattawa is concerned, above all, with the ramifications of a new global culture that most American poets have thus far ignored and neglected, partly out of incomprehension, partly out of fear. By setting himself against such timidity, Mattawa offers his most sustained and experimental reckoning with matters of cultural and social witness. Tocqueville is part personal lyric, part jeremiad, part shooting script, and part troubled homage to the great wry chronicler of American society evoked in the book's title. It is a book of relentless invention that is also relentlessly urgent—and that is a very rare thing indeed. Khaled Mattawa is, quite simply, one of the finest, fiercest, and most original poets of his generation."
—David Wojahn
"Khaled Mattawa's Tocqueville is novelistic in its reach and depth....The book's experimental rhythm and movement is surrprising, but one feels that it isn't experimental for the sake of mere difference or style. In fact, the collection's clarity is almost spiritual. Tocqueville names the names, walks the walk, and definitely talks the talk. Here's a book of marvelous poems for our times; its textured complexity radiates and sings."
—Yusef Komunyakaa
New Issues Poetry & Prose
