Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.31 (971 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0819572764 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 112 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-10-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. (Sept.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. This is a fascinating work, brimming with bold meditations on religion, sexuality and what it means to live the life of an artist. What do I really want to share with people? Not of my methods but of myself? asks Ali in his third collection, a captivating song of himself that passionately excavates the interdependence between geography and identity. All rights reserved. Ali, who is also a novelist, presents a candid history of his wandering life—I have lived in six cities in five years— which has perpetually taken place by a river (the Hudson, Nile or Seine), always carrying with him a desire to uncover the hidden aspects of a city and, in turn, his multitudinous self (Under any city other cities exist. Ali knows the power of facts; he writes of his time in New York City: I was in exile, living out of a suitcase in a complete
Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, and Etel Adnan’s In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. This groundbreaking, transgenre work—part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past—is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Bright Felon is literally “autobiography” because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the
Loved it! This is stream of consciousness poetry, and is Ali's very personal struggle with life, family, culture, and sexual orientation alongside his description of the cities he's either lived in or visited. It's original, and was exciting to read.. "Passionate Objectivity--Tremendous" according to John Michael Albert. What a superb book. Kazim Ali obviously has all the elements of his craft under control, to the point that he can create a new form, an new rhetoric to tell the story he wants to tell, probing memory the way it happens: backwards from "now." It really works well. This was a riveting book. I love the way he strikes a sort of passionate objectivity--everything/everyone is real and meaningful to him, yet he finds a way to write about them without resorting to "poetic" emotionalism. He catches the modern conundrum: so much information,. To each their own Ruzzel Not a bad book by any means. It just wasn't my cup of tea. As far as the physicality of the product, it came to me in perfect order. No gripes on that regard.