Overview

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.

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Mai Serhan is a writer, editor and translator. She earned her BA in English & Comparative Literature and MA in Modern Arabic Literature from the American University in Cairo, as well as an MSt in Creative writing from the University of Oxford. Her poetry collection CAIRO: the undelivered letters was the recipient of the 2022 Center for Book Arts Poetry Award, the FH Pasby Prize from the University of Oxford, and shortlisted for the 2022 Quarterly West Poetry Award. She is the author of I Can Imagine It For Us: a Palestinian daughter's memoir, a finalist for the 2022 Narratively Memoir Prize and forthcoming with AUC Press in 2025.

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