The Far Mosque

By Kazim Ali

This is the author’s second book. Author is very active as a speaker and reader, and is well-connected in the Asian-American literary community. Though this is his first poetry collection, he has been an active reader for over a decade. The book has excellent potential for creative writing and Asian studies course adoption. Author holds an MFA from New York University. Author’s poetry, fiction and essays are widely published in journals and magazines. His first novel was published in 2004. Author is an active member of the Alice James Poetry Cooperative. These elegant, fragmented lyrics will appeal to a broad range of readers. Kazim Ali’s family comes from South India (the city of Hyderabad), descended form Shi’a Muslims who immigrated from Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. The book draws on ideas from Sufi-ism, a branch of mystical Islam. The author’s background and themes are particularly important given current interest in Islam. The author is also a visual artist, and the book will use one of his paintings as cover art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Release date: May 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781938584848

Kazim Ali

Born in the UK and raised in Canada, Kazim Ali is a Queer, Muslim writer who is currently professor and chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of 25 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translations, as well as the editor of five collected volumes. In 2004, he co-founded the small press Nightboat Books and served as its first publisher, and he continues to edit books with the press. Ali is also a certified yoga instructor, teaching yoga and training yoga teachers in Ramallah, Palestine for many years.

Book preview

[image: cover]    1

Gallery

You came to the desert, illiterate, spirit-ridden,

intending to starve

The sun hand of the violin carving through space

the endless landscape

Acres of ochre, the dust-blue sky,

or the strange young man beside you

peering into "The Man Who Taught William Blake

Painting in His Dreams"

You’re thinking: I am ready to be touched now, ready to be found

He’s thinking: How lost, how endless I feel this afternoon

When will you know:

all night: sounds

Violet’s brief engines

The violin’s empty stomach resonates

Music a scar unraveling in four strings

An army of hungry notes shiver down

You came to the desert intending to starve       so starve

Renunciation

The Sailor cannot see the North—but knows the Needle can—

The books were all torn apart, sliced along the spines

Light filled all the openings that she in her silence renounced

Still: her handwriting on the papers remembered us to her

The careful matching of the papers’ edges was a road back

One night Muhummad was borne aloft by a winged

Reviews for The Far Mosque

[dasam-5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Kazim Ali's collection of poetry are shaped by their own growth and search for meaning. Though often in fragments or snippets rather than any classical form, their have shape and are accessible as they are rich in an eloquence that is often epigrammatic:

"When a Scholar pauses by a closed door
She may not be listening to the music, but to the door"

"Carry what you can in your hands. Scatter the rest."

There is a humble humanity and a deep compassion in Ali's words. As mush as this collection reflects the diaspora of language and people in our post-post-Modern world, there is hope and a sense of the unity of being:

"Then the gray-green sky came down in breaths to my lips and sipped me."