SUKUN
New and Selected Poems
Kazim Ali
Wesleyan University Press, 2023
Anxiety is the cure for anxiety. I want to worry on a corrected yesterday about the world. Belief, behave. The writing of Kazim Ali has always given my smallness a place to re-shadow the reshaped. But that’s the least of its giving. In Ali’s Sukun, the touched new and the pristine selected reveal themselves as differently chosen under the sameness of an art lit by the singularity of twinned inquiry. Such utterances are blessedly sick with a patience that approximates the space between god-distracted angels. Grave, ghost, gargoyle- by which clock does stillness begin to age? Longhand language and the would-be theft of silence. This is time’s early work.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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Previous reflections on the work of Kazim Ali:
Silver Road
essays, maps & calligraphies
Tupelo Press, 2018
‘my hunger hungry to tell me’ – {from} Search Me
I have told myself repeatedly, in context, that the brain is there to recount for the body how form was ripped from non-existence. I know to know wrongly. This Silver Road, by Kazim Ali…I’m not sure it’s real. By which I mean one can be drawn to a thing that leads to its own unprovable arrival. By which I mean I’m not sure it happened. I have been trying to write about it for weeks. I won’t say words failed me, but will say I have been worried the words will know how I’ve responded. Silver Road is spotless. Is deeply marked. I scrawled, or thought to my others, throughout:
weather the self
mother more creatively
death is an environmentalist
page 84, the poem ‘Theft’. return to it and say again fuck.
I have sought solitary permissions, and have done so to be convinced I’ve become. Ali corrects loneliness. This is the same book that changed my past.
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Inquisition
Wesleyan University Press, 2018
Do strangers make you human – {from} Drone
This odd exactitude. This thisness. These inhabited levitations. These spiritual hashtags for the redactions of Babel. This poetry….found, founded, in Kazim Ali’s Inquisition.
To know there is always another text.
In a different book Jesus
never suffered, never was flogged or died
went whole into heaven without passion – {from} The Earthquake Days
To command, with embodiment, form.
…do swear oblivion
Has its own markers but where the buoy
Of being clangs its stellar ore – {from} All One’s Blue
This is a searching work, a locating text, and its voice is one that makes of ground a hymn to some future itinerary. Ali is a believer in, a writer of, histories unmade by a record-breaking presence. If he wanders into the loneliness of the long distance runner, it is to appear as the clocker of isolated sprints.
(I weep like a stone)
(Really close to) two – {from} Forgotten Equations
Sail or spin I endless ember – {from} The Labors of Psyche
These are verses, redrawn, from a borderless awe. Unmothered anecdotes that fact-check the paternal past of the overtaken visionary. Were poem to erase all I pretend to love, I could live hearing such a speaking as is here, with how it addresses the now with a deepened next.
kingsoftrain 
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