Fernando ValverdeThe Insistence of Harm by Allen Josephs Laura Juliet Wood

inhabiting it. There are stories about love and loss endured by hashish dealers, perpetual misery in the form of endless traffic, and female oppression in the form of visa denials and cannibalism fetishes. There is a little something for everyone. The Book of Cairo is edited and introduced by Raph Cormack, a translator, editor, and author with a PhD in modern Arabic literature. Through his selected stories and their strategic positioning in the table of contents, Cormack curates an impressive snapshot of Cairene life with all its laughter and misery. From the opening page of the first story, “Gridlock,” we follow a packed microbus into traffic and get a sense of modern-day life in the Egyptian capital, including hash joints made up of henna and aspirin, an engineer with no engineering background, and a street sweeper anxious about the costs associated with marrying off his daughter. The author takes a casual, almost breezy approach to the storytelling, seemingly unaware of the rising tension. Yet it remains quintessentially Egyptian—a story relatable to anyone who has endured a morning in Cairo’s hellish traffic. One of the finest achievements in The Book of Cairo was “Siniora,” by Ahmed Naji, the Egyptian novelist who was jailed in 2015 for “violating public morality” with the sexual content and drug references in his novel Using Life. Naji’s contribution to the anthology begins with the line “I must have been as crazy for her c*** as I was for the internet” and holds you spellbound for the remainder of the eleven-page entry. It is a story about love, lust, and isolation; about a couple who discovered their talents for producing hashish and sexual gratification. There is a Kafkaesque feel to the story—a sense of irreverence and pseudoreality that makes the story remarkably endearing. In conclusion, The Book of Cairo is a successful attempt to capture the essence of Egyptian storytelling in the wake of mass social change and shared trauma. It is varied and wide-ranging, filled with stories of horror , humor, and the empty spaces between. It is both strange and entirely ordinary, and yet still entirely Egyptian. Karim Zidan Cairo Fernando Valverde The Insistence of Harm Trans. Allen Josephs & Laura Juliet Wood. Gainesville. University Press of Florida. 2019. 133 pages. FERNANDO VALVERDE, born in 1980 in Granada, is at the forefront of the “Poetry of Uncertainty,” which emerged in the early 2000s in Spain. The poetry of uncertainty explores how poetic language confronts the slipperiness of reality and meaning-making processes . Rather than being simply an intellectual conceit , however, the poetry of uncertainty crafts touchpoints of language, often highly imagistic, to trigger a flow of emotion to make the act of reading and interpreting poetry a highly personal experience. Like the ultraists of the early twentieth century, they emphasize the production of emotion. Valverde incorporates the concept of harm, which is in essence a poetic mechanism rather than a specific account of an event or an atrocity. “Harm” evokes what Valverde describes as “future nostalgia” and triggers one’s personal reflections of events and people, along with a deep sense of appreciation. In “Celia,” the world is physically uncertain and “mapas no aseguran un lugar donde ir / maps do not guarantee a place to go.” Further, juxtapositions of the real and the extraordinary introduce an element of the fantastic. Nevertheless, in the middle of the poem, he writes, “es esa mi certeza / that is my certainty,” creating a point of certainty, thus allowing the reader to move multidirectionally in the text for emotionally anchoring connections. Valverde expresses uncertainty (and the state between real and unreal) as metonymies , including fog, vertigo, trackless woods. This is the primordial energy from which meaning arises and just as quickly slips back into the muffled, fogged, and trackless mind of beginning and ending. In “Un camino hacia ti,” Valverde takes the reader into the “dangerous woods” of the unknown, of the unconscious. And yet, from that sense of existential unmooredness, Valverde’s poem generates a great sense of relief, knowing he has a “road back to you” / “camino hacia ti.” In the section “Sadness in Maps,” the poems relate to a specific place of tragedy

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