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Hide: Poems
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 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.
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 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.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
Published March 3, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 16, 2026
Scripts for the Future
do you prefer photos of landscapes or photos of people: you choose the figure for god among the lavish descriptions of polar deserts, information clouds the neobeautiful…
you will all have gone ancestral by then
Gorgeous imagery braiding together such ancient and rich heritages that combined Arabic and Spanish, the sound and beating heart of cultures, referencing art and history and pain and family in all the complexity life hands us. Amazing.
Ghazal over Waves
North we go. North by fishing boat, by plane, by truck, by hot-air balloon. Look down at the waves. Blue-violet North of shorter wavelengths, shorter attention spans—call out, call out and wave. M the monocle that is the sun, M the letter-shaped sea waves, their low-hummed migrations. M of movement in miles of mothers of ancestral mitochondria. M like María leaving el Malecón, mascara running down in black waves. My parents take bad photographs. The subject is too far or the mouth mid-sentence. Wrong instant. This one was overexposed, someone laughing, wide-mouthed laughter spilling out in white waves.
Swarm
I would
here
insert
a video
of starlings
so that we may
survey
what is
particular to
splendor.
Can you see it
in your mind’s eye?
They crowd,
they alter
into a patch-
work sheet
billowed up
by digital
winds, fold, un-
fold then
wrinkle,
surge
and pivot
a down-
ward dash—
they turn,
they turn from
cloth
to liquid to
cloud.
Each terror
belonging
now
to someone
else
may well
eventually
be mine.
Video with Silk Scarf in Reverse Slow Motion
So long now I’ve searched the etymology of words Sometimes I can only read them in their atomized parts, in leaf bits The wind hold in a window In implicate, in duplicate, inexplicably I hear only the plic plic plic Fold and furrow and crease
Night Became a Long Volta
a turn of the weather turn of the head, nighttime will last fourteen hours fourteen flashlights descending the hill,
this translucent grievability, like looking through molten earth molten orange,
watch me bring about this hidden holy flash, no eyewitness— (ya no hay más) to wake, to overtake,
to make a gra- ven thing (cómo caíste, mi cielo, al suelo)
Gasp
Sky that falls into your mouth Meteorites and wages and temperatures and your perilous spirits fall earthward Remember a place that falls off the map
There Is a Devil Inside Me
Did you carry around the matin star? Did you hold forest fire in one hand? Would you wake to radiate, shimmer, gleam lucero light? Through the morning would you measure the wingspan of an idea taking off to be murmured into a jar and stored on a shelf: silueta for the feeling of in-front-of silueta for the feeling of during, of upon here silueta for beneath, for alongside silueta for instead silueta for the feeling of in-spite-of
As an answer, Raúl Zurita said, “We are metaphors for one another. Troy is an image for all future defeated cities: Hiroshima, Aleppo, Gaza.”
I learned the word about can mean “to sprout leaves.” A tree abouts. Now that my mother died, I’m afraid of reading the ending of “Magdalene—The Seven Devils,” which is about “her body’s hunger / finally evident.” I give myself the task: Tell Me About a Storm and How It Felt.
The Sea is More
The first of January. And it’s old outside, it’s the oldest day so far on record, though no one seems to mind. We kiss on the lips in the after-parties. There’s very little difference between the tongue of a man and the tongue of a woman in the dark, or between the hypnagogic and the hypnopompic transport into and out of sleep. Both are a threshold, both a trek toward the grayscale expanse of seawater. Sometimes the view of a person walking towards the sea is nothing more than a study in devolution, how some biotic urge in the medulla oblongata wants to reverse, wants to backhome, to sink, to fin out the body and reach bare ancestral forms. (January forms, two ways, far back and future.) O but gray alone, such a color is rarely useful. The sea is more blood-gray, murk-gray, more wire-wool in hue. Call it nox-touched in hot weather, silver-smithed in cold. The color turns semimetal dim under lit moons. As in tonight, the sea going all graphite. An entire history of extraction shining there, earliest pencils wrapped in string, good for marking sheep. (What will you draw for me here?) War-graphed map. Inward war. Write again the lovers into the lead-blue tomb. Begraph them, begrave them. Read it to me.
do you prefer photos of landscapes or photos of people: you choose the figure for god among the lavish descriptions of polar deserts, information clouds the neobeautiful…
you will all have gone ancestral by then
Gorgeous imagery braiding together such ancient and rich heritages that combined Arabic and Spanish, the sound and beating heart of cultures, referencing art and history and pain and family in all the complexity life hands us. Amazing.
Ghazal over Waves
North we go. North by fishing boat, by plane, by truck, by hot-air balloon. Look down at the waves. Blue-violet North of shorter wavelengths, shorter attention spans—call out, call out and wave. M the monocle that is the sun, M the letter-shaped sea waves, their low-hummed migrations. M of movement in miles of mothers of ancestral mitochondria. M like María leaving el Malecón, mascara running down in black waves. My parents take bad photographs. The subject is too far or the mouth mid-sentence. Wrong instant. This one was overexposed, someone laughing, wide-mouthed laughter spilling out in white waves.
Swarm
I would
here
insert
a video
of starlings
so that we may
survey
what is
particular to
splendor.
Can you see it
in your mind’s eye?
They crowd,
they alter
into a patch-
work sheet
billowed up
by digital
winds, fold, un-
fold then
wrinkle,
surge
and pivot
a down-
ward dash—
they turn,
they turn from
cloth
to liquid to
cloud.
Each terror
belonging
now
to someone
else
may well
eventually
be mine.
Video with Silk Scarf in Reverse Slow Motion
So long now I’ve searched the etymology of words Sometimes I can only read them in their atomized parts, in leaf bits The wind hold in a window In implicate, in duplicate, inexplicably I hear only the plic plic plic Fold and furrow and crease
Night Became a Long Volta
a turn of the weather turn of the head, nighttime will last fourteen hours fourteen flashlights descending the hill,
this translucent grievability, like looking through molten earth molten orange,
watch me bring about this hidden holy flash, no eyewitness— (ya no hay más) to wake, to overtake,
to make a gra- ven thing (cómo caíste, mi cielo, al suelo)
Gasp
Sky that falls into your mouth Meteorites and wages and temperatures and your perilous spirits fall earthward Remember a place that falls off the map
There Is a Devil Inside Me
Did you carry around the matin star? Did you hold forest fire in one hand? Would you wake to radiate, shimmer, gleam lucero light? Through the morning would you measure the wingspan of an idea taking off to be murmured into a jar and stored on a shelf: silueta for the feeling of in-front-of silueta for the feeling of during, of upon here silueta for beneath, for alongside silueta for instead silueta for the feeling of in-spite-of
As an answer, Raúl Zurita said, “We are metaphors for one another. Troy is an image for all future defeated cities: Hiroshima, Aleppo, Gaza.”
I learned the word about can mean “to sprout leaves.” A tree abouts. Now that my mother died, I’m afraid of reading the ending of “Magdalene—The Seven Devils,” which is about “her body’s hunger / finally evident.” I give myself the task: Tell Me About a Storm and How It Felt.
The Sea is More
The first of January. And it’s old outside, it’s the oldest day so far on record, though no one seems to mind. We kiss on the lips in the after-parties. There’s very little difference between the tongue of a man and the tongue of a woman in the dark, or between the hypnagogic and the hypnopompic transport into and out of sleep. Both are a threshold, both a trek toward the grayscale expanse of seawater. Sometimes the view of a person walking towards the sea is nothing more than a study in devolution, how some biotic urge in the medulla oblongata wants to reverse, wants to backhome, to sink, to fin out the body and reach bare ancestral forms. (January forms, two ways, far back and future.) O but gray alone, such a color is rarely useful. The sea is more blood-gray, murk-gray, more wire-wool in hue. Call it nox-touched in hot weather, silver-smithed in cold. The color turns semimetal dim under lit moons. As in tonight, the sea going all graphite. An entire history of extraction shining there, earliest pencils wrapped in string, good for marking sheep. (What will you draw for me here?) War-graphed map. Inward war. Write again the lovers into the lead-blue tomb. Begraph them, begrave them. Read it to me.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thanks Graywolf Press & NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy.
Available March 2026.
Carolina Ebeid's Hide talks about displacement, female bodies, and family ties through the lens of art and film. One of the most fascinating "poems" for me was the visual projection of her father's hometown on his body, which prompts him to remember intimate details like the smell of rosemary in the air. Ebeid is a master at hiding and showing the parts she would like us to focus on, seducing the reader into her world.
Available March 2026.
Carolina Ebeid's Hide talks about displacement, female bodies, and family ties through the lens of art and film. One of the most fascinating "poems" for me was the visual projection of her father's hometown on his body, which prompts him to remember intimate details like the smell of rosemary in the air. Ebeid is a master at hiding and showing the parts she would like us to focus on, seducing the reader into her world.
April 3, 2026
3.5 stars. This was a really interesting and unique poetry book that was thought provoking. I loved the visual images and poetry pieces. At times however, it felt very symbolic and I had to re-read several times to try to understand the meaning behind a poem. I think there’s a balance in poetry that some poetry can have a deeper less obvious meaning while some poetry should be more accessible to the reader. It was beautiful and unique but for me I didn’t get as much emotional feeling because I was trying to decipher the meaning so much.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews