Khaled Mattawa’s latest poetry collection
Fugitive Atlas is full of small epiphanies that remind us of the beautiful and tragic dignity of human experience. The collection draws from Mattawa s Libyan heritage and diasporic experiences to examine how individual moments intertwine with a global consciousness.
This consciousness is defined in
Our Cities, a poem that takes its inspiration from Octavio Paz s
I Speak of the City, as “the metropolis that dreams us all, that all of us build and unbuild and rebuild as we dream.”
One subtext of his work invites us to consider our
amanah - God’s trust and free will, which alludes to our essential nature as human beings - and that it is both a blessing and an affliction.