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sakeriver's review
I love what Ali does sonically with these poems, and how the sound plays against or with the words as they appear on the page. There is so much going on in these poems, about time and space, about body and mind and perhaps spirit? About, I think, human connection. I have only barely begun to unpack these poems, but it is a task I look forward to spending more time with.
dariusap27's review
5.0
What really struck me about Kazim Ali’s The Voice of Sheila Chandra were his created forms and how they fit the content or worked against grammatical constraints to get across an effortless feeling kind of logic. I felt propelled through this work, even without the usual grammatical features that generally help me make my way through. Instead, the removal of articles, punctuation, or half-thoughts in certain places really helped these long sequences truck along, and allowed some space for more philosophical musings and interaction by the reader that have never really work for me in poetry otherwise (maybe excepting Wallace Stevens, who I definitely think Ali is communing with in this book and perhaps in his other work as well). In my own work, I feel frustrated sometimes by form: what form to work in, what best fits the poem, why a certain form matters. And oftentimes I feel like I make the wrong decision, and only find a form for my poems that fits months later, generally at the suggestion of another poet, really making it difficult for me to revise in a timely way. I’ve been reading a lot of work that’s helped understand why certain formal features work (like spaces within a line, line breaks, stanza breaks, or invented forms) including Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar and Soft Science by Franny Choi. Books like these are teaching me not to feel afraid of putting a poem in the form that feels right, but also not to force certain forms onto poems that might prevent a fluid reading.
Regarding the content of The Voice of Sheila Chandra, I can’t say enough good things, and urge everyone to read it. I think the moment that will really stick with me was Ali’s transformation of god into a dog, “who kindly takes my hand in his mouth / The kind of friendly beast who wants to lick me everywhere.” He’s really interested in prayer, song, the ways we use language to interact with the divine, and tries to find an honest space to express this within his everyday identity. This is another thing I’ve been grappling with in my recent poems, and reading how Ali does this has been especially informative for me. This moment of intimacy with God is representative of Ali’s struggle with place, identity, sexuality, and religion within the book, all coming to a head in a moment of severe tenderness and desire, imagining god as a someone who might care for the speaker by cleaning or pleasuring him. I also think Ali writes the ocean really beautifully, and would love to reread this book again by tracking how that shifts and changes. I think the ocean, or water in general, is very important in many books of poetry I’ve read by people of mixed heritage living in the U.S., as a means of transport and separation and longing, as something that swallows you up as well as spits you up on some distant shore. Kazim Ali, born in U.K. to parents of Indian descent and who has lived in Canada, India, France, and the Middle East, is absolutely subject to all those complex feelings about home and place, and communicates this beautifully and genuinely time and again in The Voice of Sheila Chandra.
Regarding the content of The Voice of Sheila Chandra, I can’t say enough good things, and urge everyone to read it. I think the moment that will really stick with me was Ali’s transformation of god into a dog, “who kindly takes my hand in his mouth / The kind of friendly beast who wants to lick me everywhere.” He’s really interested in prayer, song, the ways we use language to interact with the divine, and tries to find an honest space to express this within his everyday identity. This is another thing I’ve been grappling with in my recent poems, and reading how Ali does this has been especially informative for me. This moment of intimacy with God is representative of Ali’s struggle with place, identity, sexuality, and religion within the book, all coming to a head in a moment of severe tenderness and desire, imagining god as a someone who might care for the speaker by cleaning or pleasuring him. I also think Ali writes the ocean really beautifully, and would love to reread this book again by tracking how that shifts and changes. I think the ocean, or water in general, is very important in many books of poetry I’ve read by people of mixed heritage living in the U.S., as a means of transport and separation and longing, as something that swallows you up as well as spits you up on some distant shore. Kazim Ali, born in U.K. to parents of Indian descent and who has lived in Canada, India, France, and the Middle East, is absolutely subject to all those complex feelings about home and place, and communicates this beautifully and genuinely time and again in The Voice of Sheila Chandra.
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