About the book

Weaving the lyrics of Frank Ocean’s discography, Hazem Fahmy’s Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is a poetic account of four years of shuffling, a catalogue of the constant in-betweenness of being caught in the middle of two places across an ocean. Exploring themes of family, gender, and the attempt to find meaning outside the confines of the state, Fahmy’s sophomore collection uses the singer’s iconic music and persona as a guidepost to a firmer understanding of the self and the spaces that define it.

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Advance praise

“Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is an exceptional example of a writer blending life and the world life moves through so seamlessly that the two become one. These poems are tender, vivid, and touchable. Hazem Fahmy is a writer of immense care, and immense patience, and that care appears not only on a line level, but in an even greater way: in the opening of a palm and the whispering of I’d like to show you something that means the world to me.” —Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

“Hazem Fahmy’s sophomore collection is a feast. Purposeful, international, intersectional, and lyrical, the poems are heartbreakingly attuned to the conversations of Fahmy’s generation. Frank Ocean is a light post, a guiding vision of how one narrates the highway of a budding and beautiful life ‘split over oceans,’ and a long and slow road trip soundtrack. Devour these poems. Enjoy the innocence and decadence of Waiting’s magical ride.” —Shayla Lawson, author of This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls & Being Dope and I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean

“Hazem Fahmy is a poet of preservation. If a museum is a house that cares for, and displays, objects and vignettes of the past, then Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is a museum. In it is a keen and compelling exhibition of haunting artifacts and moments from the speaker’s childhood in Egypt: evidence of a resistance to erasure and forgetting, even through migration to America. ‘I am still learning to forget the house / I learned to cook in. The house I stopped speaking / of love in,’ Fahmy writes. Part family album, part map across the geographies that have shaped his life—from Cairo’s many highways to L.A., Houston, and the Hudson—this book asserts the voice of a poet concerned at once with the minutely domestic and the transnational. In refreshingly honest, unadorned lyric, the poems on display here bring us into the world of a boy who wants nothing more than to dance to the backdrop of wreckage and newness, in a city ‘in love with its fences.’” —Sara Elkamel, author of Field of No Justice

Press & reader reviews

“It is in the gap between the tangible music of the sanctified singer and the empty promise of his return that Hazem Fahmy’s Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo takes shape. The poems in the collection span both time and space, condensing both into a series of images that landmark the continuities of constant movement. … Ultimately, Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo is a beautiful collage of interiority and exteriority, as Fahmy warps his own trans-continental experience around the beacon of Ocean’s art. The collection is about Frank Ocean, but it’s also about what Ocean’s music is about: needing love, needing touch, being vulnerable and tough and masculine and queer all at once. Fahmy’s command of language and imagery turns the words on the page into something as moving as music.” A review by Grace Novarr for Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism

“I am learning to call / things disruptive instead of radical. Once, hair, sweat / and bad breath became the monikers of the night, / and it was intoxicating. My fear of the mosh pit / never left. I never wanted a single house to be / my world. I am still learning to forget the house / I learned to cook in. The house I stopped speaking / of love in. The house I learned to trust / hands other than mine in. The last couch I slept on / said something about where I was with my father then. / That time, I listened. The cold walk home could be a slow / hell, but it could also be a still kind of heaven. I no longer / await the day I will be happy. A stupid kind of progress.” Three poems by Hazem Fahmy for the Half Mystic blog

“This one really hits the sweet spot, for me, of skillful yet accessible. The personal / narrative subject matter and the straightforward syntax make these poems easy to understand, while at the same time they are deep and complex enough to read many times over, having a different experience each time. There is some magic going on here. Sometimes the emotions hit me before I could process the words. The collection is real, raw, honest. If you read poetry to dive into another person's psyche, complete with their thoughts, senses, stories, desires, longings, heartaches, obsessions—give this a try.” A review by Elliot Riley

“Fahmy is more than just a fan of Ocean. In these poems, Fahmy and Ocean are creative equals in dialogue with each other, exchanging language and ideas. … It feels as though the poet is holding his breath through most of this collection. He waited for the release of Blonde. He waited for his father’s rage. He waited for Americans to ask him about being Muslim and for his relatives and friends to ask him what kind of American he’d become. He waited to belong somewhere and to someone. And then: ‘I no longer / await the day I will be happy. A stupid kind of progress’. Gradually, Fahmy begins to heal himself and his relationships. The collection does not exactly end on a sound resolution, but that’s not necessarily what Fahmy desires anymore. He’s leaned into the healing powers of love, forgiveness and community. In the swarm, Fahmy has found some sort of stable footing.” A review by Ivy Clarke for The Mercer Cluster

“Fahmy captures moments of flux, of transition, of otherness, tenderly combining them with the words of Frank Ocean’s music. Each poem is a crystalline moment perfectly melded with a Frank Ocean song. The feeling of displacement, a constant sense of transition that one cannot shake, are illustrated in the lines of this book in such a subtle but tangible way. It’s strange how these feelings overlap with queerness, amplifying the sense of being an outsider, which is encapsulated in Frank Ocean’s lyrics and Fahmy’s poetry so well. The experience of being between two worlds while battling both homophobia and xenophobia makes you strong, but thankfully for us, Fahmy never lost his tenderness.” A review by Liv Pasquarelli

“This poetry collection will make you think about how certain experiences (and even artists, albums, and songs) shape your life. I was easily captivated by Fahmy’s words, and the way he so seamlessly strings together memories and experiences with specific lyrics from Frank Ocean songs. … I, like Fahmy, connect with music on another level, and am drawn to the beauty and rhythm of delicate strings of words and lyrics. In one poem, Fahmy recounts a family argument at home in which he avoids by turning up the volume on a Frank Ocean song. Music can heal and drown out the pain and hurt in which we are exposed to, and even if only temporary, memories about music’s healing powers have the ability to stick with us for a lifetime. Fahmy writes: ‘I wanted the fleeing ecstasy only possible in the minutes of a Frank Ocean song.’ He reminds us that music can heal, support, and mend us, but at the end of the day, it can only do so much. I think that no matter what we are going through, what journey we are on, or what we are seeking in life, we are all in search of a feeling — a feeling that comes from music that makes us feel most alive.” A review by Carly Kwiecien for Read With Carly

“So many of the poems in this book are ones of observation, of family, friends and familiar spaces that grew odder as I grew older. Part of the driving force of the project was the interrogation of that eeriness. I was trying to understand: had leaving Cairo somehow altered me on a fundamental level such that the mundane and quotidian now seemed strange? Or was I, in a sense, destined to reach an age where something as simple as my family’s living room became eerie? Now, I can see that all this questioning came from a deep sense of love for my family and all its contradictions. It was, in turn, my family’s love which gave life to these poems.” An interview with Hazem Fahmy for the Half Mystic blog

“I think this is the most creative poetry collection I’ve read in years. I love music and how it can move you, and even though Frank Ocean isn’t amongst my favorite artists, it was still amazing to revisit his music from a whole different perspective, one that invited me to live through it. I would recommend this poetry collection to people who like melancholic songs—those that make you want to dance and cry. It’s hard to read this book and not be moved.” A review by Andrea Valcárcel for Andrea’s Galley

“Lyrics pilfered from a multitude of songs are sprinkled in poems and make up the numerous centos, but in no way do they feel like someone else’s voice. This is no fawning, parasocial relationship between artist and fan. Frank does not hang on the poet’s walls, but Frank’s songs linger in the background of philosophical car rides and blare at ear-threatening levels to drown out his father’s angry muttering. But music is not a perpetual antidote capable of curing all the problems that pervade the minutiae of everyday life.” A review by Tejashree Murugan for Reclamation Magazine

About the author

Hazem Fahmy is a writer and critic from Cairo. His debut chapbook, Red//Jild//Prayer, won the 2017 Diode Editions Contest. A Kundiman and Watering Hole Fellow, his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2020, AAWW, The Boston Review, and Prairie Schooner. His criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Mubi Notebook, Reverse Shot, and Mizna. His performances have been featured on Button Poetry and Write About Now. He regularly writes about remakes and other media matters on Medium @hazfahmy.