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Sham-e-Ali Nayeem’s “The City of Pearls” Goes into Second Printing!

City of Pearls by Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, goes into second printing after selling out within its first year!

Pre-Order on Amazon!

“City of Pearls is one continuous gift-giver. Sham-e-Ali Nayeem lusciously, unselfishly and most certainly, unapologetically shares with us the magic and glory of story. Stories made from lived lives…full with words and images that speak of…place, purpose, father, family, fragility, strength, beauty, suffering, celebration. Stories to hold us tight…and inspire us to continue dreaming through it all.”

– Ursula Rucker, Supa Sista 

“I was brought back to the landscapes of my childhood by these sensitive poems. So quietly but firmly do they evoke not only the shattered rocks of Hyderabad but also the ways in which some of us live perpetually between, belong neither to one place nor the other, always in transit, always hoping for news from ‘home.'”

– Kazim Ali, Inquisition

“This book is a hamlet, a jewel box, a compass. Sham-e-Ali Nayeem strings the tender odds and ends of memory into a dazzling odyssey across the continents of daughterhood and motherhood. We are born from places as much as people, these poems remind us. City of Pearls soars with the dignity mined from a life lit with leavings.”

-Yolanda Wisher, Monk Eats an Afro

“There is nothing more important to love than memory, and Sham-e-Ali’s stunning debut collection is full of love. Awash in the fragrance of mourning and yearning, these poems stretch out, split into tributaries, condense into coral clouds – above all, they nourish. Both affectionate and merciless, this book is a “place where it all worked out.” It is a gift to breathe with it.”

– Bao Phi, Thousand Star Hotel

Sham-e-Ali Nayeem

Listen to Sham-e-Ali Nayeem talk about her poetry here on Full Service Radio

More on her performance with contemporary Afghan composer, Qais Essar, at The Kennedy Center: “Now You See Us”

Sham-e-Ali in the Washington Post’s The Lily: 3 Questions with Sham-e-Ali

About the Author:
Sham-e-Ali Nayeem is a poet and visual artist who was born in Hyderabad, India and raised in both the UK and the US. A former public interest lawyer supporting economic justice for survivors of family violence, Sham-e-Ali is a recipient of the Loft Literary Center’s Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship.

River Musi

my beginning lies by the river musi
bisecting my birthplace
between old and new city
tributary and life source
to a city of pearls.

musi flows like a thin fissure
in a heart now split in two.
polluted river swells and recedes
streaking oily rainbow ripples
over glossy water.

south of the river, old city
with my father’s home and it’s shia shrines
heart and eyes
memory of floods and
earth that cradles rebellious bones.

north of the river, mallepally
with my mother’s home and it’s winding streets
lungs and gut
and breath that does not remember
when the sky dips low to kiss you.

on some other earth
under a different sky
i dream you.
do you remember me?

your daughter
born at sunset
a beginning
of evening.

no matter how far
whatever bridge I cross
i kneel by your banks
tenderly cup you

in my hands.

(c) Sham-e-Ali Nayeem from City of Pearls

City of Pearls

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2018 New Release: Mediterranean

The Mediterranean Sea has become a harrowing gauntlet for hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants each year. Through the intimacy and immediacy of fiction, poetry, photography and reportage, Mediterranean explores these turbulent journeys.

Lyric fiction by Edwidge Danticat, Maaza Mengiste, Boubacar Boris Diop, and Chika Unigwe hones in on the dislocation that marks individual passages. Mario Badagliacca’s haunting photos of found objects recovered from capsized vessels serve as a visual guide to communal tragedy. Poems by Jehan Bseiso and Ali Jimale Ahmed strain with memory and loss, while Hassan Ghedi Santur’s narrative reporting on African migration brings us inside Europe’s detention centers and camps through the eyes of those he meets there, holding the continent to blistering account for the systems it has built and the people it has failed. Evoking the sustenance of home, the book also includes recipes from migrants along with stories connecting them to the places they left behind.

Finally, Mediterranean offers an in-depth syllabus providing additional avenues for study through compelling literature, theory, art, and film.

Mediterranean is the first book by the editors of Warscapes.

Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings

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2018 New Release: Vanessa Huang’s “quiet of chorus”

Vanessa Huang’s quiet of chorus bears witness to an intimate terrain traversing pasts, presents, and futures within and surrounding political movements to end various embodiments of the prison industrial complex in the 2000s, California, and beyond. Making refuge in diaspora, the poems in quiet of chorus inhabit and transform the poet’s languages of heritage and migration into their own call-and-response syntax, inviting readers and listeners into prayer, pause, novel gesture towards freedom.

quiet of chorus lifts up the often muffled lineages of resistance to normalized state violence in contemporary life. Huang’s embodied poem-worlds stoke our yearnings for freedom and wholeness, and help enliven the path forward.”
Morgan Bassichis

Excerpt from this gorgeous debut book of poetry:

Gaza waterprayer
–after Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”

Dear human body,

You do not have to be good or bad.
You do not have to pray angelic,
veil each thousandth tide this dying body.
You only have to let each shrivel
loosen and tell what it tells: fire from the air, fire from the sea.
Love me, shrivel to shrivel, as I’ve loved each unwanted red flower.
Meanwhile each cell of child in bodyprayer.
Meanwhile each fold my ocean still swell
awash such jail amassed through years, the terror each backlaw
bone grown brittle, dry from such weeping.
Meanwhile the quiet dust of sage and cardamom
still speak to the restless ones, the wild now resting in my heart.
Meanwhile we all are returning home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely
the trailing paper you condemn or praise, how ill the restless imagination,
it calls to you, swimming my waters, still wild in love’s embrace—
over and over announcing return:
simple prayer of each living thing.

 

Vanessa was a finalist for Poets & Writers’ 2010 California Writers Exchange for her poetry manuscript, quiet of chorus, which has been described as a project that “lifts up the often muffled legacies of resistance to genocide in contemporary life” and home to “lifeworlds that yearn for freedom and wholeness, and help enliven the path forward.”

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Origin Story: Upsetting Brooklyn

by Eleanor J. Bader

When Zohra Saed was a child, her father frequently spoke about two things: Islam and Afghanistan, her family’s country of origin. She found his stories riveting. In fact, she loved them so much that she started writing stories and poems of her own.

“I’d go to the elementary school library and doodle poems into the books,” she begins, her smile widening with each spoken word. “The teachers thought I was defacing school property but what I was actually trying to do was put myself up on a library shelf.”

It’s now nearly three decades later and Saed’s goals have not so much changed, as expanded. As co-publisher of the Brooklyn-based UpSet Press, she and her business partner and close friend, Robert Booras, seek to print poetry and prose that takes readers out of their social and political comfort zones.

The collaboration has resulted in three first editions since 2004: Nicholas Powers’s Theater of War; Matthew Rotando’s The Comeback’s Exoskeleton; and Cihan Kaan’s Halal Pork and Other Stories. In the fall of 2010 they released a second edition of Suheir Hammad’s Born Palestinian, Born Black, an out-of-print book of poems that had originally been published in 1996.

Saed and Booras met at Brooklyn College in the late 1990s when both were pursuing Master of Fine Arts degrees in poetry. “I was doing a ’zine called SPAWN and Zohra was doing a ’zine called RIPE GUAVA. We met in a feminist theory class and said, ‘Gee, we have to link up and join forces,’” Booras begins. “At first we shared networks and I was publishing her in my ’zine and vice-versa. After a few years of being each other’s cheerleaders, we decided to merge efforts and become a non-profit press.”

Their first impulse, he continues, was to promote writing that was ideologically progressive. “We saw that political poetry was frowned upon,” he says. “Poets were dismissed if they had too much of a message or made too much of a statement.”

Saed—more bubbly and effusive than the quieter, more laid-back Booras—nods in agreement but adds that the impetus to form a press was also a direct descendant of a punk-inspired Do It Yourself—DIY—ethos that continues to motivate them. “If you don’t see what you want out there, make it yourself,” she says. “For me, it’s about creating a library of books that I want to read.”

And the name? “The name took at least three years of back-and-forth,” Booras laughs. “The word upset has two meanings. One is about upsetting the status quo, but the second is about championing the underdog. When the lesser team wins it’s called an upset. Jamaican reggae and dub musician Lee Perry, who is also known as ‘The Upsetter,’ further inspired us. This sense of being a rabble rouser had a lot of appeal when we were debating different names.”

While Booras and Saed acknowledge that their initial vision has shifted a bit since UpSet incorporated in 2000—a feat accomplished with help from Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts—the desire to publish or republish what Booras calls “left out voices, voices that go against the grain,” remains ironclad.

“We’re trying to be innovative and add to what’s already out there,” Saed says. “We’re bringing back writers whose work has either been forgotten or that has never been translated into English.”  One such writer, Nadia Tueni, a Lebanese poet who died in 1983, is on their wish list. They are currently working with Tueni’s granddaughter to obtain the rights to the poet’s work. Once that is accomplished, the work will be translated from French to English; it will subsequently be introduced into the U.S. marketplace.

Matthew Rotando reading at the launch of his book, The Comeback’s Exoskeleton.

For Booras and Saed, the process of recovering overlooked texts is exhilarating, and their enthusiasm for uncovering lost gems is obvious, even contagious. At the same time, they believe that it’s also important to stay contemporary. They call their most recent release, Cihan Kaan’s Halal Pork and Other Stories, a perfect fit for UpSet—a rhythmic, avant-garde look at North America through the eyes of a young, non-religious, Texas-born Muslim reared in the Borough of Churches.

The first fiction writer of Crimean Tatar descent to be published domestically, Kaan’s five-story collection defies categorization. His themes range from the treatment—and mistreatment—of Muslim Americans since 9/11, to the gentrification of Coney Island, to white racism in the punk music scene.

Perhaps surprisingly, Kaan wasn’t looking for a publisher when serendipity brought him into contact with Booras and Saed. Instead, the fledgling publishers found the fledgling writer at a screening of She’s Got an Atom Bomb, a film Kaan completed in 2004. Saed recognized Kaan from high school—they both graduated from Sheepshead Bay in 1993—and one thing led to another, the end result being the publication of Halal Pork in early 2011. Although readying the text for publication took several years, both publisher and author say they are thrilled with the result.

Publishing, however, is a constant process, with little down time between books. Indeed, despite ongoing efforts to promote the four titles they’ve published to date, Booras and Saed are working hard to map out their next four-to-five projects. Some, like a collection of poems by Jennifer Husk, are near completion and will be out later this spring. Next year’s books will include a novel by Champa Bilwakesh, whose work has appeared in the Kenyon Review and Monsoon Magazine. In addition, the first of several Tueni translations and a book of poems by Amir Parsa are in the pipeline for late 2012 or early 2013.

As for Booras and Saed personally, the two—published writers themselves—are hopeful that UpSet will take off in a big way, allowing them to quit their day jobs and focus their energies on bringing innovative, original writing to readers the world over.

“We’re always on the lookout for people who exercise the craft of writing in a way that’s smart,” Booras says.

Saed shakes her head vigorously and it is clear that she and Booras are of one literary mind. “We try not to be limited by style,” she says. “We’re looking for writing that feels beautiful and necessary and critical. Critical is important. Every one of our writers has a critique, an urgency. Cihan Kaan is a perfect example. His work has so much energy. It’s playful but offers a missing perspective on being here, in Brooklyn, and being turned upside down and into The Other by 9/11. It’s the post 9/11 experience without melancholy.”

And it has resonated.

Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to be a Problem: Young and Arab in New York, calls Halal Pork “irreverent, urgent, funny, and refreshingly unpredictable.”

Suheir Hammad’s Born Palestinian, Born Black has been similarly lauded. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye calls Haddad’s collection “a brave flag over the dispossessed,” and E. Ethelbert Miller of the Institute for Policy Studies says that the poems “open a door to learning.”

It goes without saying that these comments please Booras and Saed. Nonetheless, they’re concerned about the future of the industry and are presently exploring e-publishing their future releases. That said, they’re optimistic about UpSet Press and are eager to see where this publishing venture will take them. Right now Booras says that they’re receiving two-to-three unsolicited manuscripts a week. While they don’t have the financial resources to publish a fraction of the talented writers who come their way, they can’t help grinning as they let their minds wander into the uncharted territory of what-ifs, whether it’s expanded sales or grants from foundations or individuals who champion cultural diversity.

“Edward Said once said something to the effect that he preferred a belligerent intelligence to conformity,” Booras quips. For him, Saed, and their small circle of authors, pushing the envelope of convention is a powerful reason for being.

Beautiful words, of course, are an added bonus.

Source: Brooklyn Rail

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Robert Booras’ Long Awaited Book of Poetry: The New Night of Always

Robert Booras’ clear, open, soulful poems in The New Night of Always handle time with dream-infused immediacy and a kind of slantwise humor built from the politics of grace that is domestic and artistic life in the thick of the big city. They subtly, if insistently, take company as a central need of one’s life, with all the attendant desires and anxieties that sense of need daily conjures, and go at its many angles with shapely precision. It’s the kind of work that serves a range of mind frames, making for a book you can carry around and read all over town.”

—Anselm Berrigan

 

Writers write their own stories sometimes. But in The New Night of Always we are all part of the club. It is a moment or forever in New York, and through it we are piecing together words, no lives, and dismembering them, ourselves and. We interrupt this poet’s embrace with city, so we are written.

—Bruna Mori

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