Holdings (Poems)

In this fifth poetry collection of remarkable poise and penetrating imagination, Egyptian American poet Matthew Shenoda steps into the Egyptian wings of our major museums, reanimating the objects, histories, and ancestral voices they house to consider how culture is made and remade across time—and how the dead continue to speak through what has been taken.

“You look at me, brother, / across the palindrome of time // bending the shackles of centuries / so we can each see the conquest fresh.”

The grain-filled body of a “Corn Mummy,” the turquoise squares of the ancient boardgame “Senet,” the funerary “Mask of Khonsu” that safeguards passage to the afterlife—in Holdings these and other fragments become emissaries from a distant past, inviting us into the worlds of their making. In each relic, Matthew Shenoda listens for the echoes of ritual, labor, and devotion—for the human voice—restoring breath and context to what a display case can only partially hold.

Crafted for ceremony and community, many of these objects now sit far from the landscapes and lineages that once animated them. Shenoda engages this long history of removal and possession through figures like the tomb raiders who did the looting and the tomb attendants who now work in our museums—illuminating questions of return, custodianship, and the futures these pieces might still claim.

In poems of impeccable craft, Shenoda slips between millennia and personae with lyric and imaginative agility. Though present in these galleries—in Giza, London, and New York—the poet remains warmly aloof, retreating, advancing, and shapeshifting as each work demands.  

Holdings is a collection of subtle and startling beauty and depth, and a reminder that culture endures not as a static inheritance but as an act of attention, remembrance, and wonder.