About Kazim Ali’s Poetry
Kazim Ali’s poetry is known for its lyrical intensity and philosophical depth. His poems often blur the boundaries between prayer and protest, memory and desire, body and belief. Rather than telling linear stories, Ali creates emotional landscapes where language itself becomes a form of meditation.
A recurring theme in his poems is displacement—the feeling of living between cultures, nations, and identities. Born in the UK, raised in Canada, and based in the United States, Ali’s transnational life deeply shapes his poetic voice. This sense of movement and unbelonging gives his poems a restless, searching quality.
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- Spirituality plays a central role in his work, but it is never rigid or dogmatic. Drawing inspiration from Sufi poetry, the Qur’an, and classical Persian verse, Kazim Ali reimagines faith as a space of questioning, longing, and intimacy. Love in his poems is often tender yet fragile—intertwined with fear, history, and silence.
- His language is musical and spare, favoring suggestion over explanation. Many poems feel like fragments of thought or breath, inviting the reader to pause, reflect, and participate in meaning-making. This openness makes his poetry deeply personal while remaining universally resonant.
Why Kazim Ali Matters
Kazim Ali stands out in contemporary poetry for giving voice to lives that exist at the intersections—queer, Muslim, immigrant, and spiritual. His poems challenge readers to sit with uncertainty and to find beauty in vulnerability, making his work both intellectually rich and emotionally powerful.
Autobiography
By Kazim Ali
we didn’t really speak
my summer wants to answer
the architecture doesn’t matter
this is not my real life
when I am here I want to know
why do I believe what I was taught
a storm is on the way
close all the windows
begin at the earliest hour
is there a self.
The Earthquake Days
By Kazim Ali
In the earthquake days I could not hear you over the din or it might have been
the dinner bell but that’s odd
because I’m usually the one
cooking if not dinner then
a plan to build new fault lines through the dangerous valley.
I can’t give you an answer right now because I’m late for my
resurrection,
the one where I step into my angel offices and fuck
the sun senseless.
That eclipse last week? Because of me.
You’re welcome.
The postman rattles up with your counter offer and I’m off
to a yoga class avoiding your call yes like the plague
because son you can read
in the dark and I have no
hiding place left.
You know me too well and you know it.
We walk hand in hand down the hill
into the Castro
avoiding the nudist protest not because we are afraid but
because we already know all about this city, its engineered
foundations,
the earthquake-proofed buildings, the sea walls.
No tempest will catch us unaware
while we claim our share of
the province of penumbral affections.
You have no reason
to trust me but I swear I lie
down in this metal box as it thunders and looks
inside my brain. I am terrified nothing
is wrong because otherwise
how will I rewrite the maps unmoored
a deep sea a moor a cosmonaut
Who needs saving more
than the one who forgot
how the lazy cartographer mislabeled
his birthplace as Loss?
Riding the bus out to the end of the lines and back
I collect trash for art, oil spill, spent forest, the mind
is at work and everything is at stake. I demand
statehood for my states of mind, senators
for my failure, my disappointment, the slander
and my brain unmapped reveals no
explanation for danger the ground untamed.
I make paintings of nothing and
stand before them like mirrors.
I recently became a man but I do
not want to let go of my weakness,
instead want to meet God in heaven and in long psychotropic odes
have Him send me again digging in the dirt to unleash
tantric animal governors to lay down
the orgasmic law twice skewered and miserable
in the old photographs, miserable in my body, huddled
next to my mother, recently permed and aglow so unaware
of what is about to hit her. I am the answer to Bhanu’s question:
“Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?” and so sick
I considered that sickness
could bring us closer and Shahid and Allen in heaven
slap me silly because they want me to know that
this world is worth its
trembling. At the next table over a mother
tries to reconcile her bickering sons. I have
no brother but the one
I invent has always got my back, he drowns
out the mullahs so my mother can
hear me finally. In a different book Jesus
never suffered, never was flogged or died
went whole into heaven without passion.
Shall I then deny myself passport through the stark places
unsalvageable, imagine it, the Mother
of Sorrows did never grieve in the new season
trees smell of semen and the tectonic plates
make their latest explosive move:
to transubstantiate my claim
by unveiling this city down to its stone.
Everyone I know wants to douse
the hungry flames, flee the endless aftershocks,
unravel every vexing question.
You owe me this witness.
I owe you the fire.
Good Boy
By Kazim Ali
Good boy for know enow I no
I-land disappear in the aft oh brave
Noh whorl in the riven hand scriven
A ridge down which waves ruff
Aves spindle in air spun the jour
Made from amber antler bone
Nohow swale apport no one star
To now credo bray veneer worn
Who had known his feres so swole
He felt the beld heads en tranced
Felt trun a trem bren trough he
Swink to sain he wont to awin that
Awn unsparing the vessel respawn
And sware to be cered be yourn
Oh good boy good boy.
Know No Name
By Kazim Ali
Know no name
Why this holy day honed
Hollow day haul
I lost wind when wooden
I can’t bear to be
Unaided in hunt unhanded
To haunt when strewn sound
Who will be held in hand
Brought sent
Mooring at the shore
Who’re you for
For what fewer who wore
Be called this wooer
More who are the ones
In horror to light will strew
then sue for war.
Rain
By Kazim Ali
With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain.
Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.
Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name.
No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.
The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written:
“Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.”
The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face.
The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.
I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled.
If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.
I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me.
The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.
Ramadan
By Kazim Ali
You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving month’s
nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.
The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?
If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets
into the air and harvest the fog.
Hunger opens you to illiteracy,
thirst makes clear the starving pattern,
the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses,
the angel stops whispering for a moment—
The secret night could already be over,
you will have to listen very carefully—
You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting
and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—
Speech
By Kazim Ali
How struck I was by that face, years ago, in the church mural:
Eve, being led by Christ through the broken gates of Hell.
She’s been nominated for the position of Featured Saint
on the Icon of Belief, up against the dark horse candidate—
me: fever-ridden and delirious, a child in Vellore, unfolding
the packet around my neck that I was ordered not to open.
Inside, a folk cure, painted delicately in saffron.
Letters that I could not read.
Why I feel qualified for the position
based on letters I could not read amounts to this:
Neither you nor I can pronounce the difference
between the broken gates and the forbidden letters.
So what reason do we need to believe in icons or saints?
How might we otherwise remember—
without an image to fasten in that lonely place—
the rock on which a Prophet flung himself into fever?
Without an icon or church, spell “gates of Hell.”
Spell “those years ago unfolding.”
Recite to me please all the letters you are not able to read.
Spell “fling yourself skyward.”
Spell “fever.”
