Kazim Ali Archive
Interconnection Beyond Denotation in Sappho’s Gymnasium
In writing lines that don’t connect, Olga Broumas and T Begley seem to want readers to focus on a poem’s space and movement rather than what its words actually mean. When we boil the experience of language down to these elements without the distraction of denotation, new possibilities open
The Fragmentary City of Bright Felon
Kazim Ali's 2009 book is built like a city: fragmentary, recursive, and at once public and personal. Travel fragments the narrator’s experience and story, shattering the idea that an autobiography should be told in complete sentences.
Letter to myself: On fatherhood and poems
A published letter is a strange act. It’s like a whisper made into a loudspeaker. It’s a secret note the town’s tacked onto the city hall bulletin board after the carrier pigeon nosedived into the public square. It’s intimacy externalized. Some letters seem to speak to no one at