Weaving the lyrics of Frank Ocean’s discography, Hazem Fahmy’s Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is a poetic account of four years of shuffling, a catalogue of the constant in-betweenness of being caught in the middle of two places across an ocean. Exploring themes of family, gender, and the attempt to find meaning outside the confines of the state, Fahmy’s sophomore collection uses the singer’s iconic music and persona as a guidepost to a firmer understanding of the self and the spaces that define it.
Praise for Waiting for Frank Ocean
“Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is an exceptional example of a writer blending life and the world life moves through so seamlessly that the two become one. These poems are tender, vivid, and touchable. Hazem Fahmy is a writer of immense care, and immense patience, and that care appears not only on a line level, but in an even greater way: in the opening of a palm and the whispering of I’d like to show you something that means the world to me.” —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
“Hazem Fahmy’s sophomore collection is a feast. Purposeful, international, intersectional, and lyrical, the poems are heartbreakingly attuned to the conversations of Fahmy’s generation. Frank Ocean is a light post, a guiding vision of how one narrates the highway of a budding and beautiful life ‘split over oceans,’ and a long and slow road trip soundtrack. Devour these poems. Enjoy the innocence and decadence of Waiting’s magical ride.” —Shayla Lawson, author of This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls & Being Dope and I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean
“Hazem Fahmy is a poet of preservation. If a museum is a house that cares for, and displays, objects and vignettes of the past, then Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is a museum. In it is a keen and compelling exhibition of haunting artifacts and moments from the speaker’s childhood in Egypt: evidence of a resistance to erasure and forgetting, even through migration to America. ‘I am still learning to forget the house / I learned to cook in. The house I stopped speaking / of love in,’ Fahmy writes. Part family album, part map across the geographies that have shaped his life—from Cairo’s many highways to L.A., Houston, and the Hudson—this book asserts the voice of a poet concerned at once with the minutely domestic and the transnational. In refreshingly honest, unadorned lyric, the poems on display here bring us into the world of a boy who wants nothing more than to dance to the backdrop of wreckage and newness, in a city ‘in love with its fences.’” —Sara Elkamel, author of Field of No Justice
Praise for Red // Jild // Prayer
“Hazem Fahmy’s Red // Jild // Prayer is the type of book that builds a world for the reader to step into. Everything has a life: the streets, the waters, the bodies of people looking for survival. Peep the care taken with images, the ability to craft complicated declarations of faith. ‘I suppose no matter how much we don’t believe in God / we still know how to pray.’ This book is a long, slow, glorious prayer. Fahmy is a confident emerging voice, with thrilling potential.”
—Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, author of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much
“Hazem Fahmy presents us here with a collection that is simultaneously profoundly intimate and sharply political, marked by desire and its implications and shaped by questions of postcolonialism, faith, and language. These poems deftly defamiliarize ‘a very old world,’ to use the poet’s words, and make it strange and so exciting. How thrilling it is to be a reader, an Arab, and a child of the Nile, in this moment—to have Hazem’s work to reach for.”
—Safia Elhillo, author of The January Children
“As Hazem Fahmy weaves their trajectory as a person and artist living in an unsteady world between homeland and diaspora, their writing operates similarly between formal and cultural influences that press upon their craft at all sides. But Fahmy sharpens their tongue against each incisor. Here we have histories, traumas, and bodies that refuse to be swallowed. Instead, they form a new tongue that speaks to us of skin, of burning, of an ancestral language living inside both. This collection is one of urgency. It is pointing to all of the windows containing us inside of tired conversation, then one by one, shattering each window down to sand. Then comes the love letter to sand, to body, to sun, to film, until softness becomes of this voice, part of a larger diaspora that is not often allowed multitudes under the thumb of empire. What a gift of a collection.”
—Jess Rizkallah, author of the magic my body becomes