CAIRO: the undelivered letters by Mai Serhan, winner of Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition, is an epistolary collection that transforms the act of correspondence into both poetic and physical architecture. Designed and letterpress printed in the CBA studios, the chapbook carries the quiet authority of the handmade: delicate paper that holds deep impressions of type, thread-sewn binding that reveals the rhythm of the poet’s line, and subtle folds that echo the private gesture of opening a letter. Within these folded structures, Serhan’s poems take shape as unsent messages—dispatches from Cairo’s rooftops, kitchens, and midnight streets—addressed to an editor who never replies. Each page feels like an artifact of intimacy, both personal and political, its physical construction underscoring the book’s themes of transmission and silence. To hold CAIRO: the undelivered letters is to participate in its unfolding: as the reader opens, reveals, and reads, the book itself performs the act of delivering what was once undelivered.
CAIRO: the undelivered letters is a haunting collection of epistolary poems addressed to an absent editor, invoking the sprawling life of Cairo through voices that are seldom heard. The work frames itself as a series of unsent letters, each one a pointed dispatch from the margins of the city—from rooftop vigils, flooded basements, broken radios, and the space where grief and resilience collide. Drawing inspiration from the long-running advice column “Bareed el Gom‘a” in Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper, Serhan flips the script: the ignored letters become central, and the editor becomes a symbolic power specifically not responding.
The poems give voice to the unseen and in doing so transform the book into both act of delivery and refusal. While the collection has since been published in a full-length edition (2025) by Diwan Publishing, its roots lie in this chapbook published by Center for Book Arts. What remains striking in this edition is how the text inhabits the physicality of the letter-form and the weight of the undelivered: the book asks its readers not only to read but to receive.
In short, CAIRO: the undelivered letters is an elegy, a protest, a memory-scape of a place that both shelters and silences. Through its poet’s meticulous craft, it quietly insists that unread voices are still voices, and that readers must reckon with what they haven’t heard as much as what they have.
Mai Serhan's chapbook CAIRO: the undelivered letters was designed and printed by Rhonda Khalifeh with the assistance of Caslon Yoon in honor of the 2022 Annual Chapbook Reading. Letterpress printed in an edition of 100.