First, a poem by way of response. Shimmering moon-mirrored reflection of wounds:








What is found in the mirror is often surprising. How the self is reflected or refracted on the smooth surface: surfeit comes back, more than one can handle. This is how I look to the rest of the world: one might think and feel a discrepancy between that version of the self and another desired presentation. Unsolicited comments chime in from the brain’s peanut gallery: “Having been seen / Comes with its own annotations.” The mirror reminds us from all sides of our perceptibility within a larger visibility regime we cannot escape. “Visibility regime” is Farid Matuk’s phrase, which gestures towards the trap of visibility, and also the surveillance state.

“There’s a trace / Of the state inside any moment,” meaning there’s no outside to the empire’s reach in the panopticon of contemporary life. Its data and language saturate us, seek to size us up, divide us, bruise us. But “we’re not inside the words,” as Farid Matuk writes. Perhaps the state’s dehumanizing language for us is a code that can be cracked in a resistant poetics, serviced towards other ends to say slantwise, reorient, redirect—if we’re self-aware enough to unlearn and “thicken the line between inner / [a]nd outer cop,” declare our own protective borders the size of poems. Plato’s theory of mimesis disavows poetry as a copy of a copy, but perhaps each additional layer of remove introduces an opportunity for slippage; glitchy subversion refusing interpellation. Copies need not be faithful.

With words being mirrors
And the transit back through their reflections,
The ear couldn’t be the mind’s
It’s the outside’s. 

It’s that outsider’s relation to words that I want to retain.






Is the mirror a weapon? In an interview for the Academy of American Poets, Farid Matuk pointed to behavior mimicry as “a fuckboy technique in which someone creates a shortcut to intimacy or real relation by affirming and matching the energy of their interlocutor.” Manipulative chameleonic surface of body language bearing unconscious social effects, exploiting a sense of rapport for exploitation. Power play and one-upmanship, like a game of chicken: “Men wield mirrors at men / Making of each other’s baby, / Spun ‘round, / While the rest of us stay in bed.” The surface of performing or imitating hypermasculinity and the ensuing hijinks of aggression and domination in the company of other men, “the rest of us” outside the ring deemed not competitors but spectators or tokens.

Toxic masculinity is by design intoxicating. Erotic, too, as Matuk brings to the fore in the poem “Alpha Video Transcripts,” crassly transcribing YouTube porn videos of so-called alpha masters, who put on a dominating persona for those seeking humiliation: “I want you to lick these abs. I really want you to see the veins. The fuckin vascularity. How fucking dominant I am.” The overlaid typeset text on the page, clashing for space and attention, veers on illegibility like a Glenn Ligon print, the disintegration in a cesspool of desire’s death drive. Matuk zooms in on how kink’s syntax of domination overlaps with destructive, fascist ethno-nationalist logics, not to draw an equivalence between consensual kink in the bedroom and state violence, but to name ways that Nietzschean will to power diffuses and seeps everywhere. 

There’s a more graphic engagement with the erotics of violent spectacle in Farid’s poem [title], after Edward Kienholz’s Five Car Stud. That painful racially charged artwork presents a graphic life-sized tableau of a lynch scene, framed by the “circumference of white vigilante headlights” of five cars staged in formation. It was hidden in storage for four decades after it was first shown in 1972. “Is not the moon under penalty of perjury / Whose axis turns men’s chests from hips up in its cold pull.” Matuk’s poem grapples with their own experience of erotic desire in the gallery, intertwined with the disturbing violence of castration: “At the spectacle of castration threatening one form sculpted in the car / To be in love with the passenger installed now in a gallery.” Seeing at a distance, the transposed death drive mingles with cruising, uncomfortably, in the cool remove of the gallery. A different mode of contact, witnessing the living and breathing even (or maybe especially?) in close proximity to death and peril. “Distance / Is the force holding words together / So that they’re free to say near.” See the passenger through the car’s side rear view mirror (convex), inscribed with the reminder that “objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.” At the risk of crashing, to admit nearness in the mirror is to welcome a destabilization of our sense-perception. Such that the syntax of the convex mirror—in contradistinction to fuckboy mirroring—might let in “an ethic in which we try to tune and calibrate toward one another to offer the other somewhere to turn, places to extend, to help each other see what we think we know, but differently.”

Which brings me to John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Back when I was an undergraduate, still a few years out from staring hormones, and when I was still seeking out a vocabulary for my nascent trans embodiment, I sought out and read into queer traces of effeminacy in that great gay long poem swirling self and otherness. Where looking in the mirror becomes a disturbance of self, seen differently through another’s self-portrait.

In a term paper, I likened Ashbery’s ekphrastic poem to drag, his queer self-portrait “pushing outside against the frame towards a dynamic and unbound vision of the self as variable and intermingled with others.” Teasing out coded references and homoerotic hints “here and there, in cold pockets / of remembrances, whispers out of time,” I scrambled to assemble a more fluid lexicon of permission for myself, permeated by a sense of otherness. Queerness and femininity being masked over and not immediately apparent, stifled by rigid social norms and punishing gender expectations.  

But slippages want to be heard, to transmit fugitive possibilities. Pull off the mask and bear witness to other parts feminine versions of the self, less visible. Back to Farid Matuk:

              “Young

Clairvoyant body

              Inside me

              I’m sorry I’ve been loud

This long, this poorly
                Around you    The masc

Worship slide is steep

And never stops

              I aged trying
To be at both ends

I dreamt, my transparency,

             That you coated my throat”

That version of the self, choked by the performative mask of masc worship, must be “clairvoyant”—to see clearly, etymologically—to dream its own form. Because it is clear, or transparent, as Matuk apostrophically addresses this inner self, its form is harder to make out. Light passes through it, shines through. It is more fragile and, for all the ways it is prescient, must be protected. “My transparency” also suggests a second meaning in relation to human conduct: openness without secrets.





The mirror is an edge against the self. A meeting ground of conflicting parts, recomposited in the  glitching surface by a trick of mere eye/ear. Threshold of the ear? Hear me out:

Monostich mirror poems act as section dividers in Matuk’s book. These are homophonic distortions of fragments of language pulled from elsewhere in the book, fugitive glitches listening back and recontextualizing fragments from inside out. Laid out on the page, the section title text is reflected and inverted, with a significant alteration. For example, “A HEAVEN OF STEEL PENNANTS” becomes “A HAVEN OF STOLEN PENANCE,” leaving the reader scrambling to fill in the threefold sonic and semantic gaps. These are edges the subject must figuratively cross and reclaim, and not just by sight but other citational logics.

Listening into the deep, in order to move across: as in a book’s suggested subplot clued by lexical clusters of “trans” prefixed words threading through the collection: transom, transit, transparency, transubstantiation. A resonance of crossing generations, genders, and other boundaries which challenges the mirror back. Proves we can change, too. This glance back is a feminizing arc, which folds over and onto itself, working surface and depth at once, which “folds / Love inside and outside at once, / Along a transference between atomic poles / That’s transgenerational because it got here.”

So that we might even get the last word. In a transgender gesture, “THE ARC ACROSS WHICH HE CAST THE BOOK” is answered by an upright shadow in deliverance, escape: “THE ARK SHE OUTLINED TO TAKE HER.”