The Voice of Sheila Chandra

by Kazim Ali

Titled for the influential singer left almost voiceless by a terrible syndrome, the poems bring sweet melodies and rhythms as the voices blend and become multitudinous. There’s an honoring of not only survival, but of persistence, as this part research-based, pensive collection contemplates what it takes to move forward when the unimaginable holds you back.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 2020

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

[John Burroughs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Day 16 of 31, #TheSealeyChallenge 2021

[Darius Atefat-Peckham · Rating 5 out of 5]

What really struck me about Kazim Ali’s The Voice of Sheila Chandra were his created forms and how they fit the content or worked against grammatical constraints to get across an effortless feeling kind of logic. I felt propelled through this work, even without the usual grammatical features that generally help me make my way through. Instead, the removal of articles, punctuation, or half-thoughts in certain places really helped these long sequences truck along, and allowed some space for more philosophical musings and interaction by the reader that have never really work for me in poetry otherwise (maybe excepting Wallace Stevens, who I definitely think Ali is communing with in this book and perhaps in his other work as well). In my own work, I feel frustrated sometimes by form: what form to work in, what best fits the poem, why a certain form matters. And oftentimes I feel like I make the wrong decision, and only find a form for my poems that fits months later, generally at the suggestion of another poet, really making it difficult for me to revise in a timely way. I’ve been reading a lot of work that’s helped understand why certain formal features work (like spaces within a line, line breaks, stanza breaks, or invented forms) including Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar and Soft Science by Franny Choi. Books like these are teaching me not to feel afraid of putting a poem in the form that feels right, but also not to force certain forms onto poems that might prevent a fluid reading.

Regarding the content of The Voice of Sheila Chandra, I can’t say enough good things, and urge everyone to read it. I think the moment that will really stick with me was Ali’s transformation of god into a dog, “who kindly takes my hand in his mouth / The kind of friendly beast who wants to lick me everywhere.” He’s really interested in prayer, song, the ways we use language to interact with the divine, and tries to find an honest space to express this within his everyday identity. This is another thing I’ve been grappling with in my recent poems, and reading how Ali does this has been especially informative for me. This moment of intimacy with God is representative of Ali’s struggle with place, identity, sexuality, and religion within the book, all coming to a head in a moment of severe tenderness and desire, imagining god as a someone who might care for the speaker by cleaning or pleasuring him. I also think Ali writes the ocean really beautifully, and would love to reread this book again by tracking how that shifts and changes. I think the ocean, or water in general, is very important in many books of poetry I’ve read by people of mixed heritage living in the U.S., as a means of transport and separation and longing, as something that swallows you up as well as spits you up on some distant shore. Kazim Ali, born in U.K. to parents of Indian descent and who has lived in Canada, India, France, and the Middle East, is absolutely subject to all those complex feelings about home and place, and communicates this beautifully and genuinely time and again in The Voice of Sheila Chandra.

[Kiran Bhat]

"A strange energy propels a Kazim Ali sentence. Heed me, it calls, and like one of the heads of the Cerberus, it bites, it snaps, and it rips one apart. The source of Ali’s power comes not merely from the spring of language, but from the tides of history. History has not been kind to those of us who are people of color and it is through the seven poems of The Voice of Sheila Chandra that Ali proposes to speak—not as one but as divergence, not through polyphony but through cacophony—to the set of struggles that unite people of completely different nationalities, races, and cultural backgrounds."

Poet Kazim Ali has written one of his best works in The Voice of Sheila Chandra. I argue why over at The Colorado Review
https://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/...

[isaac dwyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having followed Karim Ali’s work since the publication of “Bright Felon”, and even having the opportunity to take a masterclass with them in the early 2010s, a continuous question has nagged me—are their poems too smart for me?

Ali’s skill has a poet has matured—comfortingly, lovingly—over the past decade or so. Two of the longer poems of this collection put those anxieties at ease through their pure embrace of musicality that guides the emotion and the intellect—see “Hesperine for David Berger” as emotional gut wrenching par-excellence. Many of the other sections do, however, fall pray to letting the wheels fly off the post modernist wagon. Alas. Maybe a decade later I’ll have built up the skin to stomach it. For now they annoy me. Four stars because I love what I love, even if it pushes me away.

[Ryleigh Wann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put, Kazim Ali is a master of poetics. The sonics and meter in this collection are so clever, witty, and impressive. When writing poetry about a musician, you expect the writing to be sonically please, but this entire collection is much more than engaging musicality. It is curious, tender, and ethereal. Kazim Ali is an excellent poet, writer, and teacher, and the brilliance is clear on the page.

[Mike]

I love what Ali does sonically with these poems, and how the sound plays against or with the words as they appear on the page. There is so much going on in these poems, about time and space, about body and mind and perhaps spirit? About, I think, human connection. I have only barely begun to unpack these poems, but it is a task I look forward to spending more time with.

[Simon Slidders · Rating 2 out of 5]

THe fact that it is two years since I started this but have not gone back to it tends to indicate that it did not grab me as much as the title. I have been a big fan of Sheila Chandra in the past, but this collection did not come up to the sublime nature of her voice .

[Charlotte Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

*2.5

[Carrie Etter · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most ambitious, lyrically rich collections I've read in recent years. Highly recommended!

[Mark Sexton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haven't quite decided yet if this is dazzling or a case of the emperor's new clothes. One of the longer pieces, Phosphorous, is certainly particularly lyrical, inventive and playful.

[Klara Plessis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astounding! An absolute envy-inducing collection for a poet.

[Erik Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yesterday as we started hiking my stomach
Turned so quickly I had to run
Into the bushes and hardly had enough time
To pull down my pants and squat before I
Shat myself empty then when we returned
Home and showered Philippe came and he adored
My body all afternoon licked my skin he buried
His face in my armpits and breathed in deeply
Held my feet to his lips caressed and kissed them and
After we lay sweaty and talked about Duras about
This hotel by the sea how it is like the places
In her novels I said let me smell and lick your
Body too because to shit and to fuck are
Two main purposes of art