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...
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 sto...
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...
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 th...
To go without food from dawn to dusk for the month of Ramadan - how does this feel? When we deny our major appetites, what do we become? Kazim Ali brings a poet's precision and ardor to his brilliant meditations on ritual fasting.Jane Hirshfield, author of AFTER and NINE GATES, says: "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....
To go without food from dawn to dusk for the month of Ramadan - how does this feel? When we deny our major appetites, what do we become? Kazim Ali bri...
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...
This groundbreaking, transgenre work--part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past--is intensely autobiographical and confessional. ...
The Oasis of Now is the first U.S. book publication of the works of Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980), one of the major Iranian poets of the twentieth century. Well-versed in Buddhism, mysticism, and Western traditions, Sepehri mingled Western concepts with Eastern ones, creating a poetry unsurpassed in the history of Persian literature. In Iran, his Persian verses are often recited in public gatherings and lines from them were used as slogans by the protesters in 2009. This first full-length American volume collects poems from three of Sepehri's most important books, including the highly...
The Oasis of Now is the first U.S. book publication of the works of Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980), one of the major Iranian poets of the twenti...
