BOOKS

Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies

Tupelo Press
$17.95, paper 978-1-936797-99-8
January 1, 2018

From the publisher: In 1953, Yoko Ono wrote a score called "Secret Piece," a flexible and open-ended formula for musical performance in an awakening forest at daybreak. Beginning with Ono's summons, and using brief essays, diary entries, prose maps, and verse fragments, Kazim Ali constructs a path through quantum physics, sixth-century Chola Empire sculptures, literary translation, climate change catastrophes, and the destruction of handmade flutes by airport security. Amid these shards from multiple histories and geographies he finds the cosmological in the quotidian.

Praise

"Here is a vast, courageous text investigating race, separation, the molecules of space, the love of his man, and many other parts of this Living Universe in an entirely fresh and exhilarating perspective. Here is the harmony I have been seeking."
—CAConrad

"Kazim Ali extends to us a living and moving wondering in Silver Road — an active and rational thinking, yes, though poured from the vessel of body, its clay, breath and frailty. . . . Here, I can ‘stare into the dark of Nothing to see.’ Then see both ancient and newborn constellations of theory, beliefs and dreaming; see the intersections; see relationships. . . Ali’s admission of aloneness . . . causes the space of loneliness itself to collapse."
—Layli Long Soldier

"Poet Ali . . . transforms readers into his companions on his travels around the globe and on an interior philosophical quest. Ali cleverly spurns convention for this excellent mixed-genre collection."
—Publishers Weekly