Nov. 11, 2003

Ausable Press is pleased to announce the publication of

Title: Zodiac of Echoes
Author: Khaled Mattawa

Pub. date: September 2003
Category: Poetry
ISBN: 1-931337-04-7 (case) $24.00
           1-931337-16-0 (paper) $14.00
Page count: 144

Distribution: Small Press Distribution
1341 Seventh Street
Berkeley CA 94710
800-869-7553

About the Author
Khaled Mattawa is the author of Ismailia Eclipse (poems), and the translator of three volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA translation grant. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, and immigrated to the U.S. in his teens.

Advance Praise
"Khaled Mattawa's new five-part collection is about a life split between "apples and diesel fumes," between North Africa and the American south, between Arabic verse and Euro-American modernism. Mattawa has found an evocative language and a multifaceted form to embody contemporary cross-cultural experience. Kaleidescopic in structure and movement, daringly personal yet intensely political, his verse encompasses narrative, satire, meditation, and high-spirited hilarity. One moment, we?re stuck on a highway on the way to the history-glutted Mississippi River. The next, questions of exile, identity, and linguistic alienation spiral in a poem set in a jaunty Cairo taxi ride. Line by line we turn from zany wisecracks about globalization to solemn invocations of the moon, from intensely felt lyricism to splintered, televisual, attention-fractured deferrals of feeling. Mattawa?s images deliver strong sensations, his humor moves briskly, his phrases take startling turns, and his cadences roll and return and build momentum. These dazzling lyrics and sequences create one of the most compelling portraits we have of a mind, a sensibility, a language emerging from the hybridization of cultures."
                          Jahan Ramazani,
                          Professor of English, University of Virginia,
                          author of Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English

Poet and Brown University Professor, C.D. Wright has written:
Zodiac of Echoes is part divination of celestial bodies, part reading between the lying lines of cold type. Khaled Mattawa descries the transmogrification of cultures in an audacious effort to locate "where the blessing lies." he follows the world's scent. He puts it down in sand and stardust. He renders what is "mortal and resonant."

Your consideration of this book for a review is appreciated. Please send a copy of any reviews to the publisher.