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Poems for Just This Moment in History

The uprooted, the mixed-race, the merely tolerated-these American stories are making headlines, but the news fails to convey the tragedy of being suspect in a land you would make your own. Now the poet Djelloul Marbrook has given the alienated and the alienating a powerful voice in a startling and prize-winning book of poems called Far From Algiers.

He wrote the book after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, walking the streets of Manhattan and writing poems in the context of one of the most daunting challenges of our time, the migration of millions of people from south to north in search of better lives. Born in Algiers to an American mother, he wanted to affirm his love of America in the face of the nihilism of the terrorist attacks and nativist sentiment.

Djelloul (Del) Marbrook

Marbrook, 74, is a veteran newspaper reporter and editor. In this first book, winner of the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Prize at Kent State University, he shows what it's like to be half-accepted, to be a problem merely because of one's place of birth. He shows, too, that skin color is only one of the ways we paint people as outsiders.

The poet brings an uncanny ear for street cadences and an unnerving eye to the predicament of people everywhere who are desperate to be accepted in a new land that doesn't accept them. He understands the ambivalence of progressives and the hostility of nativists, and he sympathizes with both while walking in the shoes of the disinherited.

Edward Hirsch, a highly respected poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, says of Far From Algiers: "...a highly skilled outsider bursts into poetry with this splendid first book which brings together the energy of a young poet with the wisdom of long experience."

"In a dizzying and divisive time, it's beautiful to see how Djelloul Marbrook's wise and flinty poems outfox the furies of exile, prejudice, and longing," writes the poet Cyrus Cassells. "Succinct, aphoristic, rich with the poet's resilient clarity in the face of a knockabout world, Far From Algiers is a remarkable and distinctive debut," Cassells concludes.

Toi Derricotte, award-winning poet and Pittsburgh University professor, is the judge for the 2007 Wick Prize. In the book's foreword she writes:

"How honored I am-how lucky-to have been able to choose this superb first book by Djelloul Marbrook that honors a lifetime of hidden achievement . . . Sometimes the poems seem utterly symbolic, surreal; they are philosophical, political, and spiritual. The genius is in the many ways these poems can be read. I kept being rewarded by new awarenesses of the poet's intentions, by the breadth and scope of the manuscript."

Far From Algiers is being released today by Kent State University Press. Bookstores may order from the KSU Press distributor at 419.281.1802, from all local bookstores, or at the university press web site:

http://upress.kent.edu/poetry/index.html.

Interviews: Djelloul Marbrook, 518.537.3833, dmmarbrook@earthlink.net or visit the poet's web site, www.djelloulmarbrook.com. He will take part in several panels at the Baltimore Book Festival Sept. 27.

Kent State University Press
Contact: Brett Neff, Marketing, 330.672.8098
Kent OH 44242-0001