Djelloul Marbrook

Djelloul Marbrook (born 1934 in Algiers, Algeria) is a contemporary English language Algerian American poet, writer, and photographer. He grew up in Brooklyn, West Islip, and Manhattan, where he attended Dwight Preparatory School and Columbia University. He worked as a soda jerk, newspaper vendor, messenger, theater and nightclub concessionaire, and served in the U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine before beginning his newspaper career.

Career

He was a reporter for The Providence Journal and an editor for the Elmira Star-Gazette,[1] Baltimore Sun, Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel,[2] The Washington Star, and Media News newspapers in northeast Ohio, and Passaic and Patterson, New Jersey.

His poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in a number of journals.

Published Books

Far From Algiers (56pp, $15, 2008, Kent State University Press,[3] winner of the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and the 2010 International Book Award in poetry), explores the poet's feelings of not belonging to family or country.
". . . as succinct as most stanzas by Dickinson . . . an unusually mature, confidently composed first poetry collection." —Susanna Roxman, Prairie Schooner
" . . . brings together the energy of a young poet with the wisdom of long experience." —Edward Hirsch, Guggenheim Foundation
Brushstrokes and Glances (83pp $16.95, 2010, Deerbrook Editions, Maine [4]).
". . . one of those colossal poets able to bridge worlds—poetry and art, heart and mind—with rare wit, grace, and sincerity . . ." —Michael Meyerhofer, poetry editor, Atticus Review.
" . . . the poems here about museums, galleries, and studios are as penetrating as the ones about the art . . . testify to years of careful seeing." —Maggie Anderson, author of Windfall: New and Selected Poems.
Saraceno (112pp, $10, 2012, Bliss Plot Press, NY,[5]) —Few writers about the Mafia listened to the notorious Frank Costello and Vito Genovese drinking marsala and chatting in a kitchen, but Marbrook did, and he celebrates it with a poet's ear in this haunting tale of redemption.
"Not just another run-of-the-mill Mafia novel." —Small Press Bookwatch
"Saraceno is an electric tone-poem straight from a world we only think we understand. An heir to George V. Higgins and David Mamet, Djelloul Marbrook writes dialogue that not only entertains with an intoxicating clickety-clack, but also packs a truth about low-life mob culture The Sopranos only hints at." —Dan Baum, author of Gun Guys: A Road Trip (2013, Alfred A. Knopf)
Brash Ice (100pp, $14.99, 2014, Leaky Boot Press [6]) —Brash ice is broken ice that appears scarred after freezing again. The poet looks back on a dervish's trek through the world of illusions and tells us what beguiled, enlightened, froze, broke, and scarred him.
"Marbrook's collection plays on this meaning of light and life throughout and especially in the concluding section." —Michael T. Young
Mean Bastards Making Nice (166pp, $14.99, 2014, Leaky Book Press [7]) —Two powerfully original novellas are set in the New York art world. In "The Pain of Wearing Our Faces" a Manhattan art teacher and her student, a famous composer, pledge to entertain each other as they try to stay sober. He confesses to plagiarizing his most famous work, then disappears. She follows him to Woodstock and finds the woman whose music he stole. In "Grace" a Catskills teenager runs away from an abusive father, hitchhikes to the city, and is briefly homeless before finding a job as an art mover and installer. Just as she begins to believe in her future she faces betrayal by her boss.
Riding Thermals to Winter Grounds (114pp, $14.99, 2017, Leaky Boot Press [8]) —One day the poet climbed Overlook Mountain in the Catskills. An eagle began riding a thermal column in great circles, wings outstretched and motionless. In one circle the eagle came close—poet and eagle stared into each other's eyes. The poet came to see the incident as a metaphor for old age—riding the thermals of experience. Most of these poems were written with that incident on the mountain in mind.
A Warding Circle: New York stories (182pp, $15.99, 2017, Leaky Boot Press [9]) —In the title novella, young artist Artemisia Cavelli is struck by lightning on Giant Ledge in the New York's Catskill Mountains. Waking in a Kingston hospital, she sees a companion, a white wolf only she can see. All the conventions she had lived by now strike her as absurd as new intuitions lead her to correct the course of her life, fashioning a warding circle to protect a fragile group of friends. She is wrongly accused and betrayed by her mentor, a museum curator. When her mentor's life is shattered Artemisia draws her into the circle of protection.
Air Tea with Dolores (105pp, $14.99, 2017, Leaky Boot Press [10]) —A poignant homage to the poet's first love, an English girl sent to a British boarding school on Long Island to escape German bombing during World War II. The girl used to invite him into a gazebo where she served imaginary tea in painted tin cups. The experience and his memory of Dolores remained throughout his life an encounter with the fey. He never quite recovered from their separation at the end of the war.
Making Room: Baltimore stories (171pp, $15.99, 2017, Leaky Boot Press [11]) —In the title story Paolo, a Manhattan artist who moves to Baltimore for studio space, creates a magical room for a young psychiatrist's adopted and traumatized infant nephew—a room with the heavens projected above and hideaways in the walls. To help him, Paolo recruits a metallurgist haunted by a disturbed upbringing. As the three collaborate, a rewarding friendship unfolds to enrich and complicate their lives.
Nothing True Has a Name (108pp, $14.99, 2017, Leaky Boot Press [12]) —These alchemical poems inquire deeply into the passion for containment symbolized by classical Greek vessels. They challenge our compulsion to categorize and pigeonhole. They seek to define the idea of ennobling elixirs. The image of galleys sailing on the winds and laden with Greek amphorae tied to each other by their necks haunts this collection. The poet concludes that names inevitably mislead us. He urges us to transcend them, not revel in them.
Even Now the Embers (93pp, $14.99, 2017, Leaky Boot Press [13]) —A hospital’s there now / where nightmares hid in closets / and stairwells echoed Vesti la giubba. So opens this collection of poems recalling a turbulent childhood. In these poems the poet rescues the child left behind but encounters grievances and must account for himself.
Other Risks Include (93pp, $14.99, 2017, Leaky Boot Press [14]) —Taking his title from the fine print of pharmaceutical advertisements, the poet addresses the risks we take, the risks we don't take, and the consequences. The title of the poem "clear cache escape program help" reveals this unending struggle to confront or escape risk. How much of our lives can we say we have truly lived? the collection seems to ask. What are the risks of sleepwalking?
The Seas Are Dolphin's Tears, (122pp, $14.99, paper, 2018 Leaky Boot Press) —A man awakens, not from sleep, but from spiritual torpor, and finds himself waiting elves' tables and attending elementals' parties. He recounts his dervish journey, fabulous and perilous, like Sindbad's. His recognitions are like forbidden fruits. He sees that his ultimate task is to disappear.
Light Piercing Water trilogy (2018, Leaky Boot Press [15])

— Book 1, Guest Boy ( 223pp $17.99, paper, $28.99 hardback) —Bo Cavalieri, a laconic sailor, earned a Silver Star from the Navy as a frogman and now sails the world as a Merchant Marine officer. Many shipmates treasure his drawings of themselves that Bo gives them. His adventures in Hamburg, Morocco, Italy, Oman, Somalia, Edinburgh, and New York echo The Odyssey and The Seven Voyages of Sindbad.
— Book 2, Crowds of One (269pp, $18.99 paper, $28.99 hardback) —The dying sultan of Oman leaves Bo two priceless manuscripts, a 14th Century sailing rutter and an illuminated alchemical treatise. He is stalked by agents of two powerful men, vying to steal his manuscripts. In New York he becomes entangled with the beautiful British mathematician Margaret Wadeleigh, daughter of his childhood love, and her friend of many years, Adeline Compton, a conservator of antique musical instruments. His long estrangement from his artist-mother ends when she calls for his help in her last days. Set in Manhattan and Woodstock, New York.
— Book 3, The Gold Factory (254pp $17.99 paper, $28.99 hardback) —Chechen arms dealer Commodus da Cunha kidnaps Bo to acquire his medieval manuscripts. Adeline launches a rescue mission, recruiting Margaret, retired IRA bomber Joe Minihan, and giant PLO assassin Si Larbi to follow the kidnapper to Portugal. The alchemy among captor, captive and rescuers blurs their differences. The sultan's bequest to the seaman he called Sindbad changes them all.

Songs in the O of Not (100pp, $14.99, 2019, Leaky Boot Press [16]) —These are songs of obliteration, songs of the divestiture of the cumbersome self. They quarrel with identity, with labels, categories, tribalism, and the perils of overrating blood and roots. They exult in oneness.
The Loneliness of Shape (120pp, $14.99, 2019, Leaky Boot Press [17]) —These poems offer relief from the great burdens imposed on us by the ordering of society to serve the few. They challenge the way we are parsed by marketers in order to be sold goods, services and ideas and the way we are coerced into thinking of ourselves. They explore our connectedness, our action on each other, our operation as elixirs, our oneness, our indivisibility. They speak of our names, our stereotypes, our categories as baggage that hinders our understanding of ourselves as a cosmic whole.
Suffer the Children: Sailing Her Navel (poems) & Ludilon (novella) (195pp, $16.99, 2019, Leaky Boot Press [18]) —As the press covers the Jeffrey Epstein scandal we get facts, we get theories, we get commentaries, but we don't see or feel what the perpetrators and their victims felt. Suffer The Children, drawing on the author's own experience as a victim and a witness, imagines what might gone on in the minds of two boarding school children, he and Sally, and the traumatized young war widow who preyed on them. In Ludilon, a short novel, he as an adult obeys an impulse to see if Sally is all right. But none of them will ever be all right, not Aisling, the widow, and not the children, who often sneak off to Great South Bay and a foundered fishing boat named Ludilon to plot their escape. The poems in Sailing Her Navel give their testaments in their own voices.
Lying Like Presidents, New & Selected Poems, 2001-2019 (247pp, $28.99 hardbound, $28.99 paper, 2020, Leaky Boot Press [19]) for release July 16, 2020: available now for preorder from booksellers worldwide — Governments are prone to becoming sinkholes of lies. Sometimes whole societies are swallowed by them. "Lying Like Presidents," the title poem of prize-winning poet Djelloul Marbrook's new and collected poems, is a meditation in cantos on this horrific history. The work explores how our minds rewrite and invent memories to light our footsteps towards the kind of persons we aspire to be. The lies we tell ourselves, the poet says, can transfigure our lives—or the opposite.

Journals

His poems have been published by American Poetry Review, Maintenant (2016, Three Rooms Press anthology), Barrow Street, Coal Hill Review, Omniverse, Knot Magazine, Galatea Resurrects, Pirene’s Fountain, Istanbul Review, Taos Poetry Journal, Orbis (UK), Aesthetica (UK), From the Fishouse, Oberon, Hot Metal Bridge, The Same, Reed, Fledgling Rag, Pine Hills Review, Le Zaporogue (Denmark), Poets Against the War, Poemeleon, Van Gogh's Ear Anthology (France), Atticus Review, Deep Water Literary Journal, (Ireland), Attic, Perpetuum Mobile, and Daylight Burglary, among others.
His fiction has been published by Literal Latté, Potomac Review, Orbis (UK), and Breakfast All Day (UK), among others.
An interview with him by Warda Atroun appeared in The Peregrine Muse [20]
A profile by Nina Shengold appeared in Chronogram [21]

Anthologies and blogs

His poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, including most recently the New Millennium Writings anthology in 2017; Red Sky, the Sable Books anthology in 2016 about violence against women, and the 2016, 2017 and 2018 Writing for Peace anthologies Dove Tales.
His essays and book reviews have appeared in Voxpopulisphere.com , Coal Hill Review, Omniverse, Galatea Resurrects, Knot, and Arabesques, among others.

Translations

In May 2018 three poems were translated into Italian by Angela D’Ambra and published in Poetarum Silva.
Jean-Yves Cotté is translating the poetry book Brash Ice and three books of fiction (Mean Bastards Making Nice, A Warding Circle: New York Stories, and Making Room: Baltimore Stories) into French for publication by Gwen Catalá Éditeur, Toulouse, France.
Fahredin Shehu is translating into Arabic a manuscript tentatively entitled So as Not to Lie in Runes for publication in English and Arabic by Leaky Boot Press, UK. He will accompany his translations with calligraphy.
Miloud Homida, Algerian poet and translator, has translated several poems from Far From Algiers, 2008, into Arabic for publication in Algeria.

Photography

Marbrook learned photography in the Navy and became a reporter-photographer. He has never exhibited his photographs but shares them on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and djelloulmarbrook.com .

His unpublished work includes one fiction and several poetry manuscripts.

Prizes and awards

Far from Algiers (2008, Kent State University Press) won the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and the 2010 International Book Award in poetry.
"Artists Hill",[22] an excerpt from Crowds of One, Book 2 in the Guest Boy trilogy, won the 2008 Literal Latté fiction prize.

References

External links

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[1] ttp://www.stargazette.com

[2] ttp://www.journalnow.com/

[3] ttp://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/2010/far-from-algiers/

[4] ttp://www.deerbrookeditions.com/?page_id=805

[5] "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2017-09-18. Retrieved 2016-07-18.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)

[6] ttp://www.leakyboot.com/

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[20] ttps://sites.google.com/site/theperegrinemuseii/interviews/interview---djelloul-marbrook

[21] ttp://www.chronogram.com/hudsonvalley/the-literary-palette-of-djelloul-marbrook/Content?oid=2175171

[22] ttp://www.literal-latte.com/2008/11/artists-hill/