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. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~~~~~ 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. ~ 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.
God is only god when god stops watching. I ask for my weight in longing. I ask in the after of our again-death for my weight in Ohio longing. In Ohio Ohio is worried. The called-off search for the person who’s never lonely.
frostbitten birthdays the moths vanish all except the one that I press to my stomach like a mother’s mother’s mother’s ear yours mine mother who
There is not in me a heartbroken ghost It’s okay My whole childhood I treated my thoughts as bones After all, after all After all this light A moth can’t be starved by god
I absolutely love Babak Jalali's Fremont. For how it memorializes memory, for how it details and decorates the abandoned time machine of place, for how its characters believe they are pressed for words when they are actually pressed for how to language them, for its inward humor and outward heroics, for the path it cuts for heartbreak, for the space it leaves the unfixed, and and and. And nothing I’ve said really says anything that speaks to what this film creates a voice for. As Donya, Anaita Wali Zada’s performance is both wall and fly, a movement based on a waiting impatience, a look looking for a look back. Visibility is no healer. Witness, no miracle. And yet, you’ll see, if you haven’t already, something new, here. Something wonderfully made. Familiar, far away, whole. . Karim Ouelhaj's Megalomaniac is mean, mad, and sad as fuck. A brilliance in its desperation. A sobbing in its violent glories. Pay attention to what it shows. Almost anti-exploitive. Eline Schumacher is a revelation whose performance ditches the revelatory to be instead a human from trauma's first future. It's demonic through and through, and raises the living. . Via hyper engaged writing that re-imagines tired time travel and horror fantasies into a very awake grindhouse style teen movie that's progressive in both its reverse reverence and anti-homage, Jennifer Reeder's idea-driven and visually off-road Perpetrator invades and enhances spaces usually reserved for male histories and occupies the timeline thereof by overthrowing the mundanely comfortable with the bizarrely familiar. Kiah McKirnan makes her impossible performance relatable long enough to give it teeth, and short enough to quicken the blood might the heart reclaim its beating. There's so much here that even its revelations play catch-up to the known and the knowing. . Dustin Guy Defa's The Adults is a ferociously sad film, not a showstopper in sight, just all show all the time. As siblings, Sophia Lillis deepens everything she does and doesn't touch, Hannah Gross is hermetically raw, and Michael Cera channels Julia era Tilda Swinton and Taxi Driver era Robert DeNiro in a performance that marries mirrors to every fantasy he's been divorced from. Don't blink, it's gone faster than loss can lose. . Return has a future in Jagoda Szelc's Tower. A Bright Day. Just because it's ancient doesn't mean it's a demon. The world comes for us, despite our rituals. What is it about non-American performances that seem to be lived-in and okay with dying? None of this art matters if there isn't some recognizable earth. Anna Krotoska is revealing and familiar in her demands and commands and reprimands, and makes this whole thing human. What a perfect film. Humanistic, animalistic, so known, so unknown. It only takes a moment. The abyss, the void, the hour of confession, the always of nature, the possessed second. Good goddamn. . What an indictment of absolution, is Dea Kulumbegashvili's Beginning. Witness is a weak viewfinder. One mirror turns to salt, one to stone. Fire is just trying to see itself. Sorry, I got drunk. Watch this film anyway. Sober up. . Like watching a road movie in an empty house, Andrea Pallaoro's Monica is, by design, clumsily American, and, by detail, a hermetic ballet. Patricia Clarkson loses half her grip to illness beautifully, and we see the angel that saves her and the devil that rescues. Emily Browning and Joshua Close do well with small untouched touches, and Adriana Barraza looks at something we can only see. But the film belongs, and is given, to Trace Lysette, whose performance is a summoned stillness, a balance of childlike return and transformed vanishment. The last scene matters to all, but only because it feels like a first time for us and for them.
You’re still mentioned in the poem that kills you. Children confuse god. (Suicide for how it tells me perfectly nothing) Even weapons in Ohio let silence leave.
Men & Sleep Jay Besemer Meekling Press, 2023 chance animals a man a mania maintained Jay Besemer’s Men & Sleep is a restlessly melodic verse of fractured energy and subtracted expedition. Ah, the maleness of my fake and tired knowing. A me-shaped forgetting. A you. I’m exhausted and can’t sleep. Sleep won’t die. I don’t know what my speaking touches. I don’t know where. Here is weather: The recency bias of the wounded latter. Here is a forest: The unbodied nearness of the hurt now. Besemer’s voice is pinpoint, but also un-surrounded. Bread and breadth. An underground melancholy, a pop-up tremor. The middle is the only beginning that can disprove origin. Tree, because tree. Ah, this formfitting imagery, squeezed through a scarred peephole. And these who-less creatures bathed far-off by the darkening of tomorrow’s remnant astonishment. It’s all here because it’s all there. One will feel partially found. Not by the all-ness of connection, nah. But by the mapped disconnection that holds things to the same legit remoteness. ~ reflection by Barton Smock
The poor, when poor, comfort god with horror films. One misses with others with a single letter an entire language. Being is everywhere. Angels erase death for having a memory. Thinkers in the violet capital of atrocity invent thought. God is ok.
The rare the sober cigarette. The blinking start of a toy fire. God's name so long it cured my first stutter. The homesick spider's unmoved hunger.
Aftermath is dead Let the bomb believe it had a rib to lose Let the image of two birds sharing a stone be the end of my eyes In pencil ghosted pen let her write lifetime supply Childhood is necessary bc god can’t swim
kingsoftrain 