CAIRO the undelivered letters

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.

"I could not help but think of Jack Spicer's After Lorca, another brilliant book of epistolary poems while reading CAIRO: the undelivered letters; and what Spicer says of perfect poetry, that it 'has infinitely small vocabulary.'"

-Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars (New Directions, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.