Kazim Ali

Northern Light

A collection of autobiographical poetry traces the author's life in different cities as he comes of age, exploring such themes as religion, sexuality, culture, history, and family.

Autobiography and Cities

Bright Felon

YOU are Krishi, a Whisperer studying ancient, secret magic at the Citadel. A secret visitor arrives late one night with news of the encroaching attack by the powerful Narbolian empire, who are poised to possess all of the kingdom of Elaria. Will the decisions you make protect the many wondrous people of this rich, fantastic world?

The Citadel of Whispers

notes from a spiritual practice

Fasting for Ramadan

essays on poetry, art and the architecture of silence

Orange alert

Kazim Ali has become known for his careful attention to the architecture of a poem, his restless intellect and his musically driven line. In these eight poems and two diary entries, Ali draws on deep literary and cultural tradition to explore history, devotion, both spiritual and physical, and loss and loneliness in fractured lyrics, surreal narratives and prose poems. In addition to a ghazal, 'Rain', and a poem drawn from his study of yoga, 'The Art of Breathing', he includes an imagined correspondence between the Sufi teacher Rumi and his friend Shams, a poem and diary entries from his experiences of fasting, and the persona poems 'Fairy Tale', 'The Wrestler' and 'The Astronomer'. Taken together, these poems demonstrate once more Ali's profound belief in sound and breath as the measure of an ever-shifting and deeply felt interior life.

Pluck Me and Hum

Kazim Ali's poetry debut draws on mystical traditions of the world's religions in its urgent quest.

The Far Mosque

A dynamic collection of contemporary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by North American Muslims.

Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims

New Moons

All One's Blues collects early, new and unpublished poems by Kazim Ali. The range of poetry readers will encounter in the book is breathtaking: the poet gives voice to Miriam, the older sister of Moses, writes letters to Rumi, confronts avalanches, inhabits Icarus's falling body, laments the imprisonment of poets. Drawing from the tradition of Persian poetry and attuned to the turns of the ever-evolving English language, moving between prayers and confessions, these poems challenge and expand the scope of the lyric and the metaphysical.

New and Selected Poems

All One's Blue

Suhrāb Sipihrī

Sohrab Sepehri

Sohrab Sepehri was in Iran, a modernist Muslim for whom the black stone of the Kaaba was the sunlight in the flowers.

Water's Footfall

Inquisition

Titled for the influential singer left almost voiceless by a terrible syndrome, the poems bring sweet melodies and rhythms as the voices blend and become multitudinous. There’s an honoring of not only survival, but of persistence, as this part research-based, pensive collection contemplates what it takes to move forward when the unimaginable holds you back.

The Voice of Sheila Chandra

These gently fragmented narrative lyrics pursue enlightenment in long, elegant yet plain-spoken, dark yet ecstatic lines. Ali travels by water and by night, seeking the Far Mosque and its overarching paradox: that when God and Self are one, an ascent into Heaven is a voyage within.

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

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.

Autobiographical and journalistic essays, diary entries, prose maps, and verse fragments pursue a path through quantum physics, sculptures of the sixth-century Chola Empire, challenges of literary translation, climate change catastrophes, and the destruction of a priceless set of handmade flutes by airport security. Amid these shards from multiple histories and geographies the author finds the cosmological in the quotidian.--

Essays, Maps & Calligraphies

Silver Road

Rohan Chhetri

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. This volume in the Unsung Masters Series examines the poetry, life, and legacy of Shreela Ray, an Indian American poet of extraordinary ability. The Unsung Masters Series exists to bring the work of great, undervalued authors to new generations of reader.

On the Life & Work of an American Master

Shreela Ray

John Hoppenthaler

Collected essays on the work of Jean Valentine

This-World Company

Jean Valentine

Anaïs Nin

A Cafe in Space is the only literary journal dedicated to diarist/novelist Anais Nin. Volume 14 contains an excerpt from Nin's Auletris: Erotica, correspondence between Nin and family members about the release of the first volume of her famous diary, criticism from several Nin scholars, poetry, short fiction, and items of interest to Nin fans.

Kazim Ali

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