Review by Booklist Review
Ali, the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction as well as translations, was born in South London to parents of Indian descent, then moved with his family first to Canada, and, eventually, the U.S. With references to Mahmoud Darwish, Louise Glück, and C. D. Wright, literary influences and poetic forms range widely here, from long, running stanzas that span multiple pages to sparse, spring-loaded koans. Ali draws on his identity as a queer Muslim writer to collapse binaries and expand the perspective of his text, recalling Islam's innovations in astronomy: In the kingdom of heaven the belt of Orion is no belt at all / but stars separated by galaxies and light-centuries. Elsewhere, Ali's deceptively simple rhyme schemes allow him to distort English into almost another language: I wild and stunned / Wandered the unmarked road / Where my bones still lie in the earth / Amid yarrow and madder and woad. Throughout, readers will encounter absolutely stunning lines that are sure to stay with them for a while, such as the bewilderingly poignant Water has no architecture in warm places. --Báez, Diego Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
