"The Far Mosqueby Kazim Ali is a book in which the author has managed to render into the English language the universal inner voice. These poems talk to the reader from the realm in which we are all human. What a poet to be able to define spirit using the American vocabulary! These poems, so very different from my own, speak clearly to me. What a gift!"-Lucille Clifton

These gently fragmented narrative lyrics pursue enlightenment in long, elegant yet plain-spoken, dark yet ecstatic lines. Ali travels by water and by night, seeking the Far Mosque and its overarching paradox: that when God and Self are one, an ascentinto Heaven is a voyage within.

Still Life with Vase and Music

Four red boats clack against each other softly, lashed to the dock.

A vase is meant to hold, not to unravel.

Each tow-rope is a thread. Each thread is a chance to weave.

The vase gives form to emptiness, as music does to silence.

At the poet's tomb in Kashmir supplicants tie green threads

around the bars to achieve the fulfillment of their prayers.

I do not want to return home without that which I came for.

"The poet was here-but he's gone now-you've missed him."

The river turns three times on the journey home.

I tie the thread around my own wrist bone.

Kazim Alilives in New York's Hudson Valley, where he is co-editor of Nightboat Books and an assistant professor of liberal arts at The Culinary Institute of America. He received his MFA from New York University and is the author of a novel, Quinn's Passage(BlazeVox Books). His poetry has been published in The Colorado Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Rattapallax, and elsewhere.

"Moving between biblical and Qur'anic stories, sections of this debut explore questions of comparative faith: 'Why not a religion of water in a time of great fires?' Painterly minimalism, open-field technique and Near Eastern traditions together give Ali a neatly varied verbal palette for his smart, quietly attractive poems. Single-line stanzas and unrhymed couplets portray visionary and partly abstract spaces where 'all the eventual answers are nothing,' and a questing reader 'will sometime soon say: I am coming home now.' A sequence set in France finds the same calm conundrums in its cathedrals and beaches, with their 'silent groundswell, the swell of silence,' while in later poems Ali pays homage by name to Emily Dickinson, to Rumi and to the painter Agnes Martin. Readers who seek explicitly Islamic material will find it near the end of the book, where unrhymed sonnets and an accomplished ghazal trace a search for spirit in nature and in the void: 'Night' advises a rapt observer: 'You are no plagiarist of dusk./ Nothing in the sky equals itself.' Ali has also published a novel, Quinn's Passage; his unresting intellect and acoustic talents make him a poet to watch. (Nov.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Kazim Ali is co-editor of Nightboat Books, and teaches English at The Culinary Institute of America. He received his MFA from NYU, and is the author of a novel, Quinn's Passage.