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| Inquisition
ISBN: 9780819577719
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Wesleyan University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Ali (Sky Ward) focuses on questions beyond human knowledge in his fourth collection, one complicated by the metaphysical and embodied intersections of being queer, brown, and Muslim. "Someone always asks me 'where are you from'/ And I want to say a body is a body of matter flung/ From all corners of the universe," Ali writes in "Origin Story," "But what I say is I am from nowhere/ Which is also a convenience a kind of lie." The poems read like visions through fog, among them a dream of swimming from a shipwreck, a parable about an astronomer, and lyrical investigations into the utility of art. Ali's impeccable word choices appear both highly controlled and effortless. His language drifts between the abstract, the spiritual, and the commonplace: "Someone I never yet knew/ Haunts me through the streets/ 'Technique is hazard'/ to lonely evangelists// Opon night resound the impossible/ Empty cello case or drunk test/ Then every form happens/ An anarchy of sense." The collection's embrace of abstraction and passive voice is both strength and weakness; pages pass by without much firm grounding. Issues with vagueness aside, Ali confronts philosophical quandaries capable of leading readers into their own reveries of the sublime. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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. |
