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- Inquisition
How we answer to love beneath the lash of history
Finalist for Lambda Award for Gay Poetry, given by Lambda Literary, 2019
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.
May
I
The Earthquake Days
Flower Gate
The Astronomer
Abu Nuwas
Light House
John
Night: A Celan Variation
Phenomenal Survivals of Death in the Mountains
Atlas
His Mosaic Prayer
System Error
Sent Mail
Origin Story
Saraswati Puja
The Failure of Navigation in the Valley
II
Trick
Messy Drunk
Letter to Zephyr from the Once-Boy Hyacinth
The Labors of Psyche
Letter to Hyacinth from the Once-Wind Zephyr
Persephone as a Boy
Drone
Chopping the Birch
The Tornado
Screen Door
Checkpoint
The Dress-Maker of Galilee
Sacrifice
Amerika the Beautiful
Inquisition
III
Bird Hospital
Marie's Crisis
Missal
Yannis Ritsos
Random Search
Square
Sun Ward
Text Cloud Anthology
Forgotten Equations
The Astronomer's Son
All One's Blue
Door Between You
Son of History
Legislature
Apasmara Climbs to the Mountain Lake
Acknowledgments
Notes
Poet, editor, and prose writer KAZIM ALI was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian descent. He received a BA and MA from the University of Albany-SUNY, and an MFA from New York University. Ali's poetry collections include The Far Mosque, which won Alice James Books' New England/New York Award, The Fortieth Day, and Sky Ward. Ali's poems, both lyric and musical, explore the intersection of faith and daily life. His prose includes The Disappearance of Seth and Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities.
"Ali confronts philosophical quandaries capable of leading readers into their own reveries of the sublime."
~Publishers Weekly
"What a gift Kazim Ali's Inquisition is, what a generosity, in its sustained and sustaining inhabitation of the mystery. That, without ignoring heartbreak or rage, it understands that we are always 'at the end of knowing,' and shows us how we might reside there. And from which residence, Inquisition reminds me: love."
~Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
"Ali's use of the inherent musicality of language gives the poems an incantatory beautyThe poems feel vibrant and effortless, with one sound, one word, blending into the next. The resulting music, that lives in the mind, in the mouth, and the air, offers its own meaning, a sense of understanding on an elemental level that is satisfying and complex."
~Vandana Khanna, author of The Goddess Monologues
"What a gift Kazim Ali's Inquisition is, what a generosity, in its sustained and sustaining inhabitation of the mystery. That, without ignoring heartbreak or rage, it understands that we are always 'at the end of knowing,' and shows us how we might reside there. And from which residence, Inquisition reminds me: love."
~Ross Gay, author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
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