Rooms Are Never Finished: Poems


Book Description

"An incomparable work, an unmatched achievement."—Anthony Hecht In this stunningly inventive collection—a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in poetry—Ali excavates the devastation wrought upon his childhood home, Kashmir, and reveals a more personal devastation: his mother's death and the journey with her body back to Kashmir.




The Country Without a Post Office


Book Description

Here Is A Haunted And Haunting Volume That Establishes Agha Shahid Ali As A Seminal Voice Writing In English. Amidst Rain And Fire And Ruin, In A Land Of `Doomed Addresses`, The Poet Evokes The Tragedy Of His Birth Place, Kashmir.




The Veiled Suite


Book Description

Beginning with the impassioned, never-before-published title poem, here is the life's work of a beloved Kashmiri-American poet. Agha Shahid Ali died in 2001, mourned by myriad lovers of poetry and devoted students. This volume, his shining legacy, moves from playful early poems to themes of mourning and loss, culminating in the ghazals of Call Me Ishmael Tonight. The title poem appears in print for the first time. from "The Veiled Suite" I wait for him to look straight into my eyes This is our only chance for magnificence. If he, carefully, upon this hour of ice, will let us almost completely crystallize, tell me, who but I could chill his dreaming night. Where he turns, what will not appear but my eyes? Wherever he looks, the sky is only eyes. Whatever news he has, it is of the sea.




Ravishing DisUnities


Book Description

A star-studded anthology infuses English poetry with the rigor and wit of a foreign form. In recent years, the ghazal (pronounced "ghuzzle"), a traditional Arabic form of poetry, has become popular among contemporary English language poets. But like the haiku before it, the ghazal has been widely misunderstood and thus most English ghazals have been far from the mark in both letter and spirit. This anthology brings together ghazals by a rich gathering of 107 poets including Diane Ackerman, John Hollander, W. S. Merwin, William Matthews, Paul Muldoon, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and many others. As this dazzling collection shows, the intricate and self-reflexive ghazal brings the writer a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Agha Shahid Ali's lively introduction gives a brief history of the ghazal and instructions on how to compose one in English. An elegant afterword by Sarah Suleri Goodyear elucidates the larger issues of cultural translation and authenticity inherent in writing in a "borrowed" form.




Life of the Party


Book Description

A dazzling debut collection of raw and explosive poems about growing up in a sexist, sensationalized world, from a thrilling new feminist voice. i’m a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl girl next door sunbathing in the driveway i wanna be them all at once, i wanna be all the girls I’ve ever loved —from “Girl” Lauded for the power of her writing and having attracted an online fan base of millions for her extraordinary spoken-word performances, Olivia Gatwood now weaves together her own coming-of-age with an investigation into our culture’s romanticization of violence against women. At times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant, Life of the Party explores the boundary between what is real and what is imagined in a life saturated with fear. Gatwood asks, How does a girl grow into a woman in a world racked by violence? Where is the line between perpetrator and victim? In precise, searing language, she illustrates how what happens to our bodies can make us who we are. Praise for Life of the Party “Delicately devastating, this book will make us all ‘feel less alone in the dark.’ ”—Miel Bredouw, writer and comedian, Punch Up the Jam “Gatwood writes about the women who were forgotten and the men who got off too easy with an effortlessness and empathy and anger that yanked every emotion on the spectrum out of me. Imagine, we get to live in the age of Olivia Gatwood. Goddamn.”—Jamie Loftus, writer and comedian, Boss Whom Is Girl and The Bechdel Cast “I’ve read every poem in Life of the Party. I’ve read each of them more than once. In some parts of the book the spine is already breaking because I’ve spent so much time poring over it and losing hours in this world Olivia Gatwood has partly created, but partly just invited the reader to enter on their own, caution signs be damned. This book is enlightening, inspiring, igniting, and f***ing scary. I loved every word on every page with a ferocity that frightened me.”—Madeline Brewer, actress, The Handmaid’s Tale, Orange Is the New Black, and Cam




The Hatred of Poetry


Book Description

"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--




The Poem That Never Ends


Book Description

Literary Nonfiction. Sparked by the only two letters--out of over a hundred-that López Medin's mother saved from her own mother in Paraguay, THE POEM THAT NEVER ENDS weaves together poems and family photos to explore the fragmentation of time, memory, and mother-child relationships. Fragments, family hearing impairments, ripped-up letters, and living and writing between languages point to the inescapable holes in language, troubling the notion of a finite utterance. Layering elements of painting, cinema, and the elusive three dimensions of theater into the weave, THE POEM THAT NEVER ENDS traces a sequence of mothers-López Medin's mother, her mother's mother, herself as a mother-in a porous, restless gesture toward what's never fully grasped.




Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals


Book Description

"Ali's ghazals are contemporary and colloquial, deceptively simple, yet still grounded in tradition....Highly recommended."—Library Journal The beloved Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali presents his own American ghazals. Calling on a line or phrase from fellow poets, Ali salutes those known and loved—W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, James Tate, and more—while in other searingly honest verse he courageously faces his own mortality.




The Final Collections


Book Description

Agha Shahid Ali (1949) Is Among The Handful Of Post-Independence Indian Poets To Have Gained International Recognition As A Writer Of Great Originality And Technical Accomplishment. This Volume Comprises His Final Two Verse Collections.




Day & Night


Book Description

"In late August of 1975 when my wife Gailyn and I and our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter arrived in Bolinas, I was almost 29 years old and had become known for writing minimal poetry sometimes consisting of a single word", Aram Saroyan writes in his introduction to Day and Night. "A young writer's ego is a delicate matter, subject as it is to routine battery and assault. When I wrote the first section of a long poem called 'Lines for My Autobiography' one afternoon on the typewriter in the poet Joanne Kyger's house. I was both exhilarated and uneasy. After all, it was two and a half pages long and I'd never before written a poem of even half its length. I ended up throwing it in the waste basket, but Gailyn fished it out, read it, and told me it was the best thing I'd ever written and to go on writing it". That poem and many others like it -- limpid, direct, revealing, open-hearted essays toward a first-person life story -- make up Saroyan's very appealing book about "big-city boys...becoming farmers" in an eccentric, idealist, crackpot-utopian California beach town in the 1970s. This is an unashamedly youthful book, starry-eyed in its approach to family-starting and community-founding, innocently celebrative of the simple wonders of a life lived close to nature. Glancing back at a glamorous but troubled childhood spent among the bright lights of Manhattan and the luxuriant palms of Beverly Hills, the young Saroyan experiences this new world with a freshness of vision.