El Cerrito

From the poem TEPCO BEACH: Alone in the afternoon I biked back to TEPCO Beach. Under the overpass where a man lived with a pile of cans (could he be any man, in any city?) across the street from the COSTCO (through the bushes, over a little dirt, past a Chinese man fishing, clear line deep in muggy water). Full of space, Noor Al-Samarrai's El Cerrito works in the wandering traditions of the Japanese haibun and the Situationist International movement to populate forgotten city spaces with an echo chamber of memories, dreams, and historical accounts. A work of documentary and eco-poetics, it is also highly relational and revealing. “Outside myself, outside myself there is a world,” said William Carlos Williams as he wanders a park in Paterson. The wanderer is a key literary figure from Rousseau and Whitman to Baudelaire and Benjamin, yet so often that solo figure occupies the one gender and race historically granted the freedom to move. “I in a rainbow sparkled skirt I in rainbow speckle skirt mismatched socks hiking boots and turban in the gun shop” begins Noor Al-Samarrai’s fabulous El Cerrito, upending the exclusions of this tradition with style and guts. But’s it’s not just the pleasures and verve of the female dandy at play here, for El Cerrito is abundantly, even extravagantly footnoted with detailed histories of the many streets, monuments, eco-systems, industries and peoples she wanders among. Enormously pleasurable, part travelogue, part historical excavation, part chronicle of the eros of friendship, El Cerrito is a dynamic debut, rich with probing intelligence and soaring with lyric freedom. -Julie Carr, author of Think Tank