BOOKS

Inquisition

Wesleyan University Press
Wesleyan Poetry, March 6, 2018
104 pages, 7 x 9"
$30.00, cloth 978-0-8195-7770-2 / $15.95, paper 978-0-8195-7762-7 / $12.99, ebook 978-0-8195-7771-9

Purchase from: Wesleyan University Press / IndieBound / Amazon

From the publisher: 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 long standing 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. Ali engages history, politics, and the dangerous regions of the uncharted heart in this visceral new collection.

Praise

"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 beauty…The 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

"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 text/ 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."

—Publisher's Weekly