Poetry. "When I read Maged Zaher's poetry I am always intrigued by the questions he asks and amazed by the unexpected layers and turns. Practically every line leads elsewhere. Saints, sex, pop culture, dreams, romance, information technology, religion, corporate life—Dante Alighieri and Barry White in the same poem—Karl Marx, Paris Hilton, Chairman Mao, Arthur Rimbaud and other suspects are all components of the volatile constellation that comprises these sharp and often funny poems. As a relatively recent arrival in the USA, Maged Zaher analyzes a contemporary America kind-of-with-a-'k,' applying a bright intelligence and tempering his sometimes irreverent enquiry with some subtle philosophizing."—Pam Brown

"Maged Zaher is in my view the contemporary writer simultaneously the furthest inside and the most outside the English language as we know it. His texts are intensely casual and bathed in the language of Groupthink and Microsoft, yet deeply thought and rhythmically alluring, which is all the more impressive for the detritus they take on and challenge. Like his near contemporary Linh Dinh, Zaher can fashion either sentence or line to the point where sublimity and absurdity make a viable erotic couple. If Frank O'Hara had been an Arab and a Coptic Christian living in late capitalist Seattle, he would have been called Maged Zaher."—Leonard Schwartz

Author Hometown: SEATTLE, WA USA



About the author: Maged Zaher was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, where he earned an M.Sc. degree in structural engineering, specializing in computer aided design. In 1995, he led the team that did the analysis of the seismic effect on the Meridian high rise hotel in Giza, Egypt. In 1998 he earned a master's degree in computer science from the University of Akron, Ohio. He has worked at many large software companies, and participated in building products such as AutoCad, Hotmail, Windows Presentation Foundations, and Microsoft Student. His main areas of interest are API (Application Programming Interface) design and building scalable and flexible SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) systems. His collaboration with Pam Brown, FAROUT LIBRARY SOFTWARE, was published by Tinfish Press in 2007.

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author @ PennSound