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.
Advance praise
“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