LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

A reinvention of visual poetry and personal history charting exile's impact on memory, identity, and futurity

Intellectual and intimate, Carolina Ebeid's Hide gathers shreds of memory, dream, and the ordinary artifacts of diaspora, as the poet casts a sounding line into her patrilineal and matrilineal histories in Palestine and Cuba. With the hum of cassettes and the glow of projectors, these poems superimpose voice upon voice, image upon image, a here upon a there, to disclose the choral noise inside postmemory.

Hide is a restless innovation of form and multimodal expression breaking open words across Arabic, English, and Spanish to release hidden meanings. Poems trace the letter M back to the Phoenician pictograph of waves, while technological "glitches" are portals that summon oracular voices across the family archive. In swirling "spell" poems, Ebeid conjures Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, whose Siluetas write the human shape upon the earth.

Ebeid's title is prismatic: Hide as in concealment, as in animal skin, as in to secret oneself away. Hide commands attention like a whispering voice, prompting readers to lean in, to listen for transmissions from ancestors and futurity both.