Please visit the page for each book to see advance praise, reviews, ordering information (including links), excerpts, and audio recordings.
HELIOPHOBIA opens with a sea nymph on the verge of death, closes somewhere between the orgiastic rapture of a rave and an ecstatic experience of midnight meditation, and pivots on the shadow of conflicting cultural perspectives—one embracing in revelry the tangible darkness of the night and the other racing in fear from beneath its shadow toward the light. The book casts veiled dream images, ideologies, and shimmering reinventions of character, myth, and archetype across continents and time, seeking the certainty of some center around which experience orbits. A resulting whirl propels the reader through goth-rock refrains and mantric prayers, incantations and phantom confessions, into an underground freefall exploring the textures of shadow and the consequences of light. FINISHING LINE PRESS, 2017. $19.
IN THE CROCODILE GARDENS is situated at the unraveling point of familiar storytelling threads. The poems bloom out of the dissolution of inherited tales, weaving in and out of the realms of lucid and prophetic dream, seeking the breathy threshold of a promise and the boundaries beyond which it cannot hold. The poems beckon deep image and duende sensation, linguistic chicanery and lexical sleight of hand. They ask the reader to consider the hagiography of the seeker, the trail of clues that make her a scavenger among the society of lore and lullaby and fantasy gone mirrorwise. These poems confront the nature of transgression, acceptance and failure, investigate the allure of mystical experience and the threat of emotional contract, questioning what can be contained within a promise without losing the self. AGAPE EDITIONS, 2016. $16.
BESIDE THE MUEZZIN’S CALL & BEYOND THE HAREM’S VEIL provides an alternate portrait of the lives of ordinary Muslim Americans. The poems range from Gulf Futuristic palimsests of medieval technical texts to discourses on the landscape of warfare, from wedding nights wishes to first dates to divorces, from childhood dreams to the longing of the body, from the spirit to the soul, demonstrating the facets of culture seldom seen on news stories and sensationalized journalism, asking the reader to consider the consequences of creating a villifying otherness and to inspect the bigger picture of the inordinate ordinary. FINISHING LINE PRESS, 2017. $14. (chapbook)
LIMERENCE & LUX focuses on the lightblooms of desire and lust and heartbreak that fill the intimate spaces of relationships between people and their shared navigation of the world’s darkness. This limited edition, hand-stitched, letterpressed, chapbook features individually-painted blue and gold covers by artist Cynthia Miller. It is available from Chax Press, now. CHAX PRESS, 2016. $20. (chapbook)
OF THE DIVINING AND THE DEAD invites you into a landscape of nightmare and dream-weave, psychic dread shadow and afterworldy uncertainty. Drawing from Sufi ideas about the state of the soul and its journey beyond the moment, these poems evoke an apocalyptic vision of a mystical unrest that speaks from beyond the bones, binding it into the desires of an every day mortality haunted by an awareness of its fading materiality. FINISHING LINE PRESS, 2012. $14. (chapbook)
Saba Syed Razvi 