Silver Road: Maps, Essays and Calligraphies

by Kazim Ali

Overview

In 1953, Yoko Ono wrote a score called “Secret Piece,” an open-ended formula for musical performance in a forest at daybreak. Beginning with this invitation to creation, and using essays, diary entries, prose maps, and verse fragments, Kazim Ali marks a path through quantum physics, sixth-century Chola Empire sculptures, the challenges of literary translation and of climate change, and destruction of a priceless set of handmade flutes by airport security. Amid shards from far-flung histories and geographies he finds the cosmos.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936797998
Publisher:	Tupelo Press
Publication date:	01/01/2018
Pages:	126
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 16.20(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Kazim Ali's books include five volumes of poetry, The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, Bright Felon, Sky Ward, and All One's Blue: New and Selected Poems; four novels, QUINN'S PASSAGE, The Disappearance of Seth , Wind Instrument, and THE SECRET ROOM; a collection of short stories, Uncle Sharif's Life in Music, and three collections of essays, Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence, FASTING FOR RAMADAN and Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine. He has translated books by Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi and Marguerite Duras. He is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Oberlin College.

Editorial Reviews

10/30/2017
Poet Ali (The Far Mosque) combines smatterings of verse with memoir-tinged prose in an exploration of our spiritual and physical connections, or lack thereof, to the Earth and one another. He transforms readers into his companions on his travels around the globe and on an interior philosophical quest. Are humans essentially alone, the book asks, or does this essential loneliness connect us all? Ali pulls in scientific concepts, comparing the “intuitive leaps that quantum and particle physics make about the nature of reality” to those made by poets, and spiritual concepts such as the Islamic tenet of kismet, which he parses as the “net of infinite relationships” between people. Ali synthesizes imagery from poets such as Emily Dickinson and Amiri Baraka that examine feelings of loneliness and the effect of the world’s material conditions on personal relationships. The author also examines how his identity as a queer person of color has influenced his perception of connections between himself and others, especially to his conservative religious family. These connections, he explains, are weakened by the “rules of gender and sexuality” among other “codes” used to categorize people. His queerness “reveals better that latent quality of loneliness shared by any mortal thing.” Ali cleverly spurns convention for this excellent mixed-genre collection. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly