Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

New and selected poems from celebrated poet Kazim Ali Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. "Sukun" means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant. This Sukun draws a generous selection from Kazim's six previous full-length collections, and includes 35 new poems. It allows us to trace Ali's passions and concerns, and take the measure of his art: the close attention to the spiritual and the visceral, and the deep language play that is both musical and plain spoken. [sample poem] The Fifth Planet Come, early summer in the mountains, and come, strawberry moon, and carry me softly in the silver canoe on wires to the summit, where in that way of late night useless talk, the bright dark asks me, "What is the thing you are most afraid of?" and I already know which lie I will tell. There were six of us huddled there in the cold, leaning on the rocks lingering in the dark where I do not like to linger, looking up at the sharp round pinnacle of light discussing what shapes we saw--rabbit, man, goddess--but that brightness for me was haunted by no thing, no shadow at all in the lumens. What am I, what am I, I kept throwing out to the hustling silence. No light comes from the moon, he's just got good positioning and I suppose that's the answer, that's what I'm most afraid of, that I'm a mirror, that I have no light of my own, that I hang in empty space in faithful orbit around a god or father neither of Whom will ever see me whole. I keep squinting to try to see Jupiter which the newspaper said would be found near the moon but it's nowhere, they must have lied. Or like god, there is too much reflection, headsplitting and profane, scraping up every shadow, too much light for anyone to see.

Literature & Fiction

Ali, Kazim

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

This groundbreaking, transgenre work―part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past―is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http://brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Essays & Correspondence

Winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry (2014) Drunk on the sun and the sea, Kazim Ali's new poems swoop linguistically but ground themselves vividly in the daily and real. Both imprisoned by endlessness and dependent on it for nurturing and care, in Sky Ward Ali goes further than ever before in sounding out the spaces between music and silence, between sky and ocean, between human and eternal. "Daily I wish stitched here to live," moans his Prometheus, wondering what release from familiar bondage might actually portend. "So long liberation," his Icarus sings as he plummets from the sky with desperation and grace, ready to unfeather and plunge into the everything-new. Whether in the extended poem-prayer to Alice Coltrane or in the "deleted scenes" and "alternate endings" to his critically acclaimed volume Bright Felon, or in the spirit-infused and multi-faceted lyrics he has become known for, Ali once again reinvents possibilities for the personal lyric and narrative.

Sky Ward (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Inquisition (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

During the 1982 air strikes on Beirut, Faiz Ahmed Faiz asked his friend Mahmoud Darwish "Why aren't the poets writing this war on the walls of the city?" Darwish responded, "Can't you see the walls falling down?" Queer, Muslim, American, Kazim Ali has always navigated complex intersections and interstices on order to make a life. In this scintillating mixture of lyrics, narrative, fragments, prose poem, and spoken word, he answers longstanding questions about the role of the poet or artist in times of political or social upheaval, although he answers under duress. An inquisition is dangerous, after all, especially to Muslims whose poetry and art and spiritual life has always depended not on the Western ideal of a known God or definitive text but on the concepts of abstraction, geometry, vertigo. "Someone always asks ‘where are you from,'" Ali writes, "and I want to say ‘a body is a body of matter flung/from the far corners of the universe and I am a patriot/of breath of sin of the endless clamor/out the window.'" Ali engages history, politics, and the dangerous regions of the uncharted heart in this visceral new collection.

During the 1982 air strikes on Beirut, Faiz Ahmed Faiz asked his friend Mahmoud Darwish "Why aren't the poets writing this war on the walls of the city?" Darwish responded, "Can't you see the walls falling down?" Queer, Muslim, American, Kazim Ali has always navigated complex intersections and interstices on order to make a life. In this scintillating mixture of lyrics, narrative, fragments, prose poem, and spoken word, he answers longstanding questions about the role of the poet or artist in times of political or social upheaval, although he answers under duress. An inquisition is dangerous, after all, especially to Muslims whose poetry and art and spiritual life has always depended not on the Western ideal of a known God or definitive text but on the concepts of abstraction, geometry, vertigo. "Someone always asks 'where are you from, '" Ali writes, "and I want to say 'a body is a body of matter flung/from the far corners of the universe and I am a patriot/of breath of sin of the endless clamor/out the window.'" Ali engages history, politics, and the dangerous regions of the uncharted heart in this visceral new collection. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Quinn, a sculptor literally and figuratively at the end of his rope, flees New York City for a capeside artists' colony. Fixated by trash, and reading Woolf's The Waves, Quinn trawls the streets and beaches of the little fishing village, tentatively exploring his relationship to the place, his art, his new friends, and himself. Moods of weather and landscape suffuse this sparely written tale that, like sunlight that pierces storm-clouds, illuminates exactly how much is at stake in Quinn's haunting search for the sublime.

Quinn's Passage

Contemporary

BlazeVOX Books

In this lyrical novel, Kazim Ali holds a vast register of human experience in his embrace: fragmentation and connection, braveness and secrecy, the present and the past that lies in ashes. Although recent history is the backdrop, the book’s heart lies in the human landscape of his characters, their sorrows and their navigation of each other.” Courtney Brkic
By turns poetic, elliptical and strikingly cinematic, this exquisitely written novel illuminates the strange tightrope we are all walking in the radically altered landscape of post-9/11 This is a novel of both deep intimacy and worldly sweep, heartfelt, wise, and studded with a sharp, wicked wit. Kazim Ali is a remarkable writer.” Dan Chaon
The Disappearance of Seth tells the interlocking stories of five New Yorkers, stumbling through their lives in the aftermath of the events of September 11 and connected by the paths of two figuresSeth, an alienated young man struggling to come to terms with his own penchant for violence, and Layla, an Iraqi artist who fled the violence of the first Gulf War and made a new home for herself in New York City. Written by an American Muslim, The Disappearance of Seth features characters both Muslim and non-Muslim, American and non-American in an arresting portrait of life in America at the beginning of the millennium. A lyrical, hypnotic narrative reminiscent of Sherman Alexie or Junot Díaz, it attempts to historicize the political events of recent years with the personal struggles of its protagonists.
Kazim Ali is the author of two poetry collections and the novel Quinn’s Passage. He teaches at Oberlin College and the Stonecoast MFA program and is a founding editor of Nightboat Books.

The Disappearance of Seth

United States

Etruscan Press

A queer writer travelling through India can't escape the regrets of his past, nor the impending ruin of his present. "I am leaving for the winter - I have to get away from this small town and all its dangers - to write, read, think, all the most important things in the world but which are thought the least important, the most expendable." Thus begins the Indian winter of our narrator, a queer writer and translator much like the author, a winter that includes a meandering journey through India, trying to write about a long-ago lover whose death he has just learned of. While on this journey into memory, he flees his current faltering relationship in search of new friendships and intimacies. Inspired by Antonio Tabucchi's Indian Nocturne, and by the writings of Anaïs Nin, Rachel Cusk, and Carole Maso, among others, Indian Winter finds itself where the travel diary, the künstlerroman, poetry, and autofiction meet. But the heartbreak brought on by his unravelling relationship and his family's inability to accept his queerness cannot be outrun; as he traverses India, our narrator can't help but repeatedly encounter himself and the range of love and alienation he has within.

Indian Winter

Genre Fiction

Coach House Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ali, Kazim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ali, Kazim

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ali, Kazim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Sky Ward (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Inquisition (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Inquisition (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Quinn's Passage

The Disappearance of Seth

Indian Winter