It's impossible to read Maged Zaher's poetry and not be reminded of the two worlds that have shaped him: his birth nation, Egypt, and his current home in Seattle, where he's an information architect. Twenty years ago, when the world was impossibly large and glacially slow, those two lives would have been irreconcilable. Now they're nearly apposite; geography supplies the greatest distance between the two points, rather than ideology or complications in communication. Zaher's poetry collection from last year, The Revolution Happened and You Didn't Call Me, at times rang with a kind of peevishness at the realization that he could see what was happening in Egypt during the Arab Spring, but that he wasn't physically there to take part.

The title of Zaher's new book, Thank You for the Window Office, hints that it's more about his here-life, rather than his there-life. And at first blush, the book does feel more interested in the language of the online entrepreneur, the wealthy nerd, the single man in an expensive suit pecking at his smartphone in the corner of the fashionable bar, trying not to look as alone as he feels. Seattle is everywhere: "This is an imaginary city/It has seven hills/And is always ready for your software needs."

Window Office could be read either as a conveyer belt of short, page-long, untitled poems or—and this is my preferred interpretation—as one long, book-length epic monologue. Zaher's language is lit up with the too-revealing fluorescent glow of corporate culture, even as his self-effacing sense of yearning tries to break through...

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