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An examination of the lingering effects of a hydroelectric power station on Pimicikamak sovereign territory in Manitoba, Canada. The child of South Asian migrants, Kazim Ali was born in London, lived as a child in the cities and small towns of Manitoba, and made a life in the United States. As a man passing through disparate homes, he has never felt he belonged to a place. And yet, one day, the celebrated poet and essayist finds himself thinking of the boreal forests and lush waterways of Jenpeg, a community thrown up around the building of a hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River, where he once lived for several years as a child. Does the town still exist, he wonders? Is the dam still operat...
* The book focuses mainly on the artist's recent works and his engagement with the Ashmolean's collections* Published to accompany an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 5 February to 26 June 2022In 2019 Ali Kazim, one of the most exciting contemporary artists working in Pakistan today, became the first South Asian artist-in-residence at the Ashmolean Museum. Drawing inspiration from the objects in the Eastern Art collections, and their contextual history, he saw his time in the Museum as an opportunity to reimagine the objects in his own work and practise. Thus, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue will focus mainly on Kazim's engagement with the Ashmolean collections and the works created between 2019 and 2021. Widely exhibited and collected internationally (including the British Museum, V&A, Metropolitan Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, etc.), Kazim lives and works in Pakistan. The exhibition and book provide the Museum an opportunity to engage wider diverse audiences, while also presenting the works of a contemporary multidisciplinary artist who reflects and draws strength from the Ashmolean collections.
This groundbreaking, transgenre work—part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past—is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http://brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/
New essays, both personal and critical, on the work of beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali
A dynamic collection of contemporary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by North American Muslims.
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.--
From the Bible to the Quaraan, the fortieth day symbolizes the last moment before deliverance, a moment in time when a supplicant or prophet or stormbeaten passenger knows there is no state "after," but finally accepts the present state as a permanent one. In The Fortieth Day, Kazim Ali follows the fractured narratives and moving lyrics of his debut collection, The Far Mosque, with a deeply spiritual and meditative book exploring the rhetoric of prayer. Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and raised in an Islamic household. He holds degrees from the University at Albany and New York University. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.
To go without food from dawn to dusk for the whole month of Ramadan - how does this feel? What do we become when we deny our major appetites during the hours of daylight, and in what ways does this transform the nights? In these absences, what new presences, what illuminations and revelations arise? After many years of not practicing, acclaimed writer Kazim Ali has re-embraced the Ramadan tradition, and he brings a poet's precision and ardor to these brilliant meditations on an ancient and yet entirely contemporary ritual. Jane Hirshfield has said, "Kazim Ali - a writer whose powers astonish in everything he puts pen to - has made in FASTING FOR RAMADAN a book that is hybrid, peregrine, and deeply, quietly revelatory. Ali's meditations on the month-long ritual fast unfold, across cultures and spiritual practices, the deep meaning of a chosen foregoing. These journal-born pages are both intimate and public, at once ecumenical, particular, daily, and eloquently learned; planted on the deep roots of tradition, they breathe this moment's air. Is it possible for a work to be at once modest and an undeniable tour de force? This book proves: it is."
Finalist for Lambda Award for Gay Poetry, given by Lambda Literary, 2019 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 Mu...
In Torn Body, One Soul, four Palestinian writerssons and daughters of a Palestinian people torn aparttell their own tales of their predicament, estrangement, and marginalization, their expectations and visions in a new, magnified voice, first to their people, then to their nation, and to a wider English-speaking public. The seventh book in a series of volumes on Palestinian authors, this collection of short stories, translated and edited by Jamal Assadi, contains works of writers hailing from different regions in Palestine and abroad. Through their stories, authors Gharib Asqalani, Huzama Habayeb, Akram Haniyya, and Mahmoud Shukair depict a faithful picture of the various aspects of life in both Palestine and the Diaspora. Their narratives defy taboos, battle oppression, break open locked gates, and speak their truth. Ranging from grave to light and humorous to sensual and remarkable, the stories in Torn Body, One Soul come from a diverse core of perspective, gender, and geographic location but provide insight into and a fragrance of a different civilization.