Malak

by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

Malak is consumed with magic and safety from impending doom and a Persian grandmother’s hobby of predicting one’s future by reading coffee grounds. Sadre-Orafai explores the effects dreams and superstitions can have on people when futures are predicted, signs are translated, and language is contested. The poems excavate the past to make sense of loss and inheritances. Populated with birds, cups, and foxes, the speaker in the poems serves as witness and teller of what people sometimes see but can't name.

“hauntingly surreal yet solidly material.”
Airea D. Matthews, simulacra

“[Malak] makes the tales of bloodlines fresh and the wild earth new.”
Wendy C. Ortiz, Bruja

“Malak abides in the rich world of lineage and divination.”
Jennifer K. Sweeney, Little Spells

Genres: Poetry

65 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2017

About the author

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of Paper Cotton Leather, Malak, and Dear Outsiders and the co-author of Book of Levitations. Her prose has appeared in The Rumpus, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, and others. She co-founded Josephine Quarterly and teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University.

Reviews

[Arden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was privileged enough to receive a copy of Malak in a Goodreads giveaway, and I was delighted!

Malak hears futures in cups the way we
hear oceans in shells. Families we know rush
through Turkish coffee, scalding their throats.
They wear dark stripes down their tongues like
Plains garter snakes, leave enough to
drip when propped against the counter.

A very cohesive poetry collection, tells the history of a family, juxtaposing their pain and sacrifice with rich fantasy and prophetic foretellings. Features lush, beautiful language interspersed with some stunning prose. Though some individual poems can be poetic to the point of obscurity, the flow of the story never fails. Slowly rotating through the wheel of death and life and the little moments between, Sadre-Orafai keeps you anticipatory, trying to savor each sumptuous morsel of poetry.

We know somebody's dad will walk out
to the square with it's bumpy sidewalks,
shake his pockets clean for pebbles, push them

inside his leather shoes. He will suffer
for our suffering as long as it hurts. Surely,
we can still see the windmill if we want harder.

Malak is about prediction. About family. About grief and acceptance. About knowing what will happen, how it hurts when you don't. Sadre-Orafai writes about foxes and birds and hares. Teenage years and long car rides. Struggling fathers. She writes about seeing the ghost of her grandmother alive in all the little things, just as her grandmother used to see the future of the family in clouds and coffee grounds. And all of it is written with such elegance. Would recommend to both established poetry lovers and lovers of magical realism.

(Honestly, I just tore through this collection when I first received it a month or two ago, and I've been lax in getting this review up, but don't let my laziness reflect on the collection! Malak was truly a work of art!

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in one day: I didn't want it to end and I didn't want to finish it in one day but the poems put you into a hypnotic trance. They are rich, magical, visionary, both a love story and a ghost story woven through surreal images as the speaker interrogates the memory of her Persian grandmother who predicted the future through coffee grinds. Nostalgic, mournful, and dreamy, these poems are excellently crafted treasures and I have no doubt I'll be snuggling up with this book again.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this collection, the poet describes “a rich world of lineage and divination,” as Jennifer Sweeney has noted in the cover blurb—a strange world invoking the use of talisman, totem, and fortune in spell-binding ways. Some of the poems are so subtly nuanced that they could use a grimoire; others, a dictionary of dreams; a few, a translation of the translation. The author’s live readings are a revelation—like scrying Turkish coffee grounds!


Favorite Poems:
“Mouthing the Future”
“Lots, Enormous Spaces”
“Company”
“Last Reading”
“Round Lake Yearbook”
“Listen”