Ebeid, Carolina: You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior

Noemi Press, 2016 Carolina Ebeid’s debut collection You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior lifts up sorrow and turns it—gently, gorgeously, unceasingly—before the light of her gaze. Paradoxical and true to life, these poems sprawl to encompass more distance the deeper inward they retreat. The interior, for Ebeid’s speaker, appears to be everything—drowned dogs, Paul Celan, autism—that swirls around and among herself and those she holds dear. “Echolalia sounds more like a concert flute,” Ebeid writes in her long, sectioned poem “Veronicas of a Matador.” “Lackofempathy could be a fern.” I am astounded by the tension Ebeid is able to maintain between inside and outside; her language is simultaneously one with the world and far, far from it. ––Gabrielle Bates *** "Small Hall of Symphony" I have been building a sizable sympathy.Inside sits a sackcloth puppetpacked with sawdust. She teeters & jerks,slumps & plays dead in a rising ovation.When a famous dancer dies early,the ballet goe