Soraya

by Anis Shivani

Soraya is a series of 100 sonnets which take the exuberance of sound as the beginning (and end) point of it is a driven experiment in the baroque potentialities of sonic texture, poetic "technique" both provoked to the extreme and deconstructed in its very creation.

129 pages, Paperback

Published June 7, 2016

About the author

Anis Shivani is a fiction writer, poet, and critic in Houston, Texas.

His debut novel, Karachi Raj, will be published in 2013. His other books are My Tranquil War and Other Poems (NYQ Books, 2012), The Fifth Lash and Other Stories (C&R Press, Nov. 2012), Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies (2011), and Anatolia and Other Stories (2009), longlisted for the Frank O'Connor award.

He is currently at work on a new book of criticism, and a new novel called Abruzzi, 1936.

Anis is the winner of a 2012 Pushcart Prize, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle, with reviews appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, Boston Globe, Kansas City Star, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, San Antonio Express-News, Charlotte Observer, St. Petersburg Times, Texas Observer, Brooklyn Rail, and others.

His fiction, poetry, and criticism appear regularly in leading literary journals such as the Boston Review, Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Harvard Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Epoch, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Subtropics, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Boulevard, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, Verse, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square, London Magazine, Stand, Times Literary Supplement, Meanjin, Fiddlehead, Antigonish Review, Cambridge Quarterly, Contemporary Review (Oxford), and many others...

Reviews

[Max Galeassi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both captivating and persecutory, my imagination was bounded and tossed into the synesthetic van and subsequently misorientated by the peculiar gyration of the road. Then I hobbled out. While this compendium of snippets of audial-orthography delineates the shattering mosaicity of nature in all of its ineffable beauty (to the extent that hodgepodge, gobbledygook, and cacophony can), I failed in my pursuit of deriving a central agent capable of spiraling the 'exercise' into the profitable, epistemic territory. Still - that didn't appear to be the point. Nor did there appear to be a point at all - which, if I may be so bold - is the point. Containing an abundance of alliteration (a guilty pleasure of mine) and seemingly cemented in no definitive region, Soraya is a wild ride.

To properly read the sonnets, it would be prudent to hold the book in one hand, while allowing your free hand to scour through a mountain of encyclopedias, of which, include topics such as, but not limited to, Greek Dialectics, Alchemy, French, Music, Chemistry, Latin, Incalculable Allusions, Ancient Politics, Modern Politics, Ornithology, Anthropology, Nosology, Most other 'Ologies', Geography, Marxism, Calculus, Medieval Warfare, Language of all sorts, Broadband Networking, Quantum Physics, Sports of all sorts, Sequiturs in relation to Non-Sequiturs (both congruent and orthogonal), Economics, and Mysticism. I like to imagine Mr. Shivani, upon concluding the last sonnet of Soraya, had to reprogramme his tongue as to not be mischaracterized while walking down the street as a raving madman having just escaped Bedlam singing to himself:

"And now I sing, Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing"

A denouncement of reality having been pigeon-holed through the channels of communication.
A stalwart, avant-garde fashioned pin in the eye of grammarians and linguists alike.
A pleasant sojourn from the status quo of agreed-upon language.
A surrealist extravaganza that topples the tower of type.
Quite enjoyable.

[Dustin Pickering · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surrealist sonnets-- I have never read anything else like this book. There is multidimensional thought going on, language borrowed from several disciplines, and a full metaphor for Soraya herself. She is language spreading through continents, the Word made flesh, and Shivani courts her in his honoring of her presence. These sonnets don't pretend to be love sonnets to the imagination or a distant woman. Shivani takes the idea to new levels. Just read the back page blurbs if you don't believe me.