Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities

by Kazim Ali

Eloquent intercultural coming-of-age story

This groundbreaking, transgenre work―part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past―is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. 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 aftermath of such revelations. 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. A reader's companion is available at

Genres: Poetry, Memoir, Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Contemporary, Biography

112 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2009

About the author

Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, includingthe volumes of poetry Inquisition, Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon and Wind Instrument. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. He is also an accomplished translator (of Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi, Mahmoud Chokrollahi and others) and an editor of several anthologies and books of criticism. After a career in public policy and organizing, Ali taught at various colleges and universities, including Oberlin College, Davidson College, St. Mary's College of California, and Naropa University. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light.

Author photo by Tanya Rosen-Jones from Kazim Ali's press kit.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite meditations on the self, the body, sexuality, family, faith, culture, and place. Oh this is a magnificent book.

[Cindy Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm no expert on poetry, but this is really beautiful. I love the prose style, and the way he equates his travels to different countries with his journey to self-realization. His poetry chronicles his acknowledgment of his sexual identity and his struggles with his faith, with his parents' beliefs and their perception of him, and his own self-acceptance. There's so much there!! I'm sure I will be reading this book multiple times over the years, and every time finding new truths. Highly recommended, even if you're not a poetry fan. The non-traditional format may work for you!

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in college, one of my professors said, "A great book teaches you how to read it." (Was he quoting someone else? I tried googling it but came up with nada.) By this definition, Ali's book is great. A casual reader might find the initial pages a jumble of incomplete thoughts and non sequiturs, but early on Ali establishes the idea of cities built atop old ones. Soon Ali's poems, through repetition of word, image, and event, cohere into topological accretions of their own. Like cities, they sometimes follow previous patterns and other times make about-faces, resisting habit and natural features. With the poems building upon each other, we follow Ali's path through various cities, which is also his journey through self-hate and denial to a hard-worn, perhaps diffident, acceptance. Identity is itself an accretion, he shows us. "We are three points on a line."

While Ali describes his lives in NYC, Cairo, DC, Barcelona, and other cities, he also writes about religious conflicts due to sexuality, family conflict from same, an eating disorder, heartbreak, the soul's stubborn insistence on survival, and healing. I've added several lines of Ali's into my commonplace book to return to and meditate upon.

[jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

the beginning was a littleee slow but once you get your bearings it’s just piercing at every line.
“did you think that sadness was the natural state of my heart.”

[Megan Willoughby · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous catalog of experience: City by city, routines & reflections. The idea that loneliness is fundamental & transformative. A journey with Kazim - and like all good writing, I was shown my own heart, reminded of my own solitary wanderings. In praise of this book's form, its cross-genre trekking, its simplicity of coffee & routine, its long, hard look into the heart.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel floored by this book HOLY F!!!!!!! IM FLOORED! Read all of it today, in two chunks, the first at the library before I even checked it out & then finished it on the Keep porch. This is one of my new favorite works of poetry of autobiography of essay, like it’s so much all of these

Every sentence was so beautiful, so playful & beautiful structured, I feel such a sad wholeness in my body after reading this, I love the working backwards from city to city, I love that place & time blur though in all of the cities, I love the way he writes about his queerness & his Islam, I love everything about this book, I am gonna write so many poems like this wow it is crazy, I wish I had read this before yesterday so i could have talked to Dave about it

Thank you zoe for putting one of Kazim Alis books in your want to reads so it could make its way to me. I am going to get all of this guys books from the library pronto

I just am so in awe of the structure here, the intelligence of different sentences & ideas returning, the he/I/you being always the same, how I started to understand his life even before we moved all the way back to those parts of it

I cannot believe he taught at Oberlin like pls come back actually PLEASE

[John Burroughs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Upon reading this book, I feel it is almost everything. I don't want to read another book, but just to dwell in this one for a while.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ali reveals how the spirit of place, in his case particular cities (New York City, Paris, Cairo, Marble Hill to name several), tests our identity. Through his own example, he brought me back to those geographies that molded and then most sorely revealed who I am. His own story is haunting and in such direct and then metaphoric language (38): "I carried the notecards because it seems the clouds existed in snatches in the sky."

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am very glad I read this. And that’s true for a lot of reasons. This is autobiography by a gay Muslim poet. I have read many autobiographies by poets and I continue to find over and over again that they slay me with their succinctness and clarity. The particularities of the story here are amazing. He has 6-8 pages on several cities he’s lived in. And the use of language and lyricism to describe both the outer geography and his inner geography cut open both. I’m so very, very glad I read this.

[Mehak · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is unlike any other book I've read. It blends poetry and prose to tell a deeply personal story that will stay with you. Love the way it's written and love his other work too.

[Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets]

Prepare for the 2010 Poets Forum in New York City (October 28-30) by reading Ali's newest book of poetry, and check out the Poets Forum 2010 bookshelf for the latest collections by each of the poets participating in the Poets Forum. Happy reading!

[Thing Two · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!

This is stream of consciousness poetry, and is his 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.

[Gabe Kalmuss-Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man is this good so far. There aren't nearly enough books (poetry or otherwise) which focus on the intrinsic connection that the physical place which contain our lives have to our development, emotions, and thoughts.

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive, lovely, and and moving. Using his transit through cities he lived in, he intertwines faith, family, sex, self and more.

This is the third time I have read it, and it still confounds me, will not give up the key to how to connect with it, for me.

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing journey, kazim-traipser candlelit alleyborne and freebursting. My review in The Brooklyn Rail:
http://brooklynrail.org/2009/11/books...

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and mysterious. This is biography, geography, and ruminations on what it means to be gay and Muslim, while at the same time it is poetry and syntax.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

very emotionally evocative book. probably one of the best books I read this year.

[Lisa Roney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and elusive (as well as allusive). This is a fragmentary hybrid prose/poetry contemplation of identity through a series of cities/towns where the narrator lived. In some ways it is a coming-of-age story--the narrator struggles to align his religion (Islam) with his sexuality (his gay identity in particular). All the while, he is contemplating the layering of history and experience in these various places, which in some ways provides a metaphor for our own development as individuals over time. The use of sentence fragments, incomplete statements, a general present-to-past direction, and leaps in time moved me toward an open kind of reading that is very new to me and that sticks with me. Sometimes I did wish I could understand a little bit more about the various other people named, but I understand that the focus is on the narrator's own internal struggles.

I've been exploring hybrid texts lately, as I seem to be working on a project that demands variations from the usual genre categories, and so far this is my favorite one. It's so powerful and delicate at the same time.

[lunarunfiltered · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5 Stars.

This book is similar to AVA, another book I had to read for this college course that I am taking on creative writing and silence breaking. This is a text that is hard to define and does not fit into any one genre. While this story is part memoir, it is also part poetry, also part straight up nonfiction, partially spiritual, and more. Normally, I don’t rate memoirs, but like the purpose of this book, I don’t want to define it into one box. I want to keep up with the genre-queer memo this book presents. Overall, I enjoyed the writing, the lyrical prose this book offered, and the movement between cities and trying to find you sense of self (or selves) along the way, which was made incredibly interesting through the use of reverse-chronology! There were some syntax issues that made this book tough to read, but still enjoyable overall. I definitely recommend this book. A more tame version of what AVA by Carole Maso, is.

[Sarah Giragosian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Labyrinthine and sinuous, "Bright Felon" queers and crosses the genres of autobiography, eco poetry, and lyric poetry. Exploring the psychic, social, temporal, and political terrain of queer subjectivity, Ali
dramatizes the ways in which genre is a social construct that implicates writer and reader in complex ways that involve constantly negotiating, revisiting, and revising the rhetorical relationships between author, readers, and language.

[Carrie Nassif · Rating 5 out of 5]

How this book kept telling me in backwards time what had been and building all the while and then, also circling back - or that is, rather, forward to words that, the second or third time are total gut punches. This book is exquisite in its scenery, but the story it tells is even better. I want to write like this.

[Zoe]

Cool how it moves thru time backwards and I like when he’s like I built my career on silence bc this whole book is in the gaps between the lines

Useful model for inter genre ness, kinda like maggie Nelson now that I think abt it, at least in how it looks on the page, but I think their fragmentations are doing different things

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through various cities, Kazim Ali deconstructs and reconstructs the idea of home and language. Ali has the ability to tell his story while obscuring what seem to be the most pressing issues—home, sexuality, and hunger.

[Marianne Szlyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading Kazim Ali

I enjoyed reading this poetic, figurative memoir. But I had to reread it for the language and imagery. This book is also thought provoking given Ali’s family situation

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an absolute. An absolute what, I don't know, but an absolute. I loved this text, with lack of definition of what to call it. The author- sculptor's emotions flowed off the page and into me. Would highly recommend this book to any person. Any person.

[Jeneva Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary prose detailing a slice of the life of this gifted poet. The best way to approach it is as contemplation and meditation.

[Daniel Oster · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Katelyn Donaldson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book!!! I reread almost every year and it is simple yet complex with its use of language, symbolism, memory. It is everything narrative poetry should be.

[Kira]

Read for MFA program! Some beautiful lines and compelling questions explored here.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading a book about cities while visiting cities sigh.