MATTAR, Mira
And most of all I would miss

“Piercing and lucid in its exposition of atmospheric violence and total erasure, Mira Mattar gets to the grain of how the languages of selfhood, mediated but also inhibited by the force of the ‘un-universal’, become complicit in forming the sovereign imperative to self-determination, ‘oh arrogant ambition / to transform / you & keep myself / plumed’, through the reproduction of a ‘contested field / of meaning’, one both marked by the lure and ruse of psychic stability as the real fantasy of occupation, and immanent to concrete, unknown modes of personal resistance and collective recovery thread like a ‘rope / in a knot in a line / of knots’, an inherited ‘excess of memory / mostly portal.’ Mattar carefully gleans in its undecidability, given over to moments of precarious decision without ties or duplicity.”
—James Goodwin

And most of all I would miss is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

Cover image: close up of bougainvillea petals scooped by the author from the gutters of Al Ajami, Yafa, Palestine, into a Wizz air toiletry bag, Oct. 2022.

Published by Veer2, 2023
Poetry