Light and Heavy Things
by Zeeshan Sahil
BOA Editions, 2013
56 pages / $16.00 buy from BOA Editions

1.  this is such a nice song oh my god http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPJFA8SldwA

2. Zeeshan Sahil was born in Hyderabad, Sindh in the ‘60s. He wrote within a fairly small and well known circle of Pakistani poets who to my mind are the Urdu answer to Bolano’s Infrarealismo movement. -A lot of prose poetry going on, a lot of experimenting with if not ignoring meter and rhyme entirely. A lot of art.

3. He published eight collections of poetry in Urdu (mostly free verse though) and also wrote for broadcast radio which is no small thing for someone in Pakistan in the time period.

4. Experimental poets writing for radio in a war torn area, kinda a thing.

5. This book is 56 pages and it took a team of three translators to bring it into English.

6. Sometimes he writes from the perspective of a woman, I think.

7. I sometimes wear lipstick to make a point.

8. He makes his point in such a quiet way, in such a vulnerable, elegant, this thin glass lightbulb could shatter in your hands at any minute way, that it’s disarming, astounding. Like eerily demure. Entirely manipulative and totally works for him.

9. “I’m not saying, I’m just saying” all over these pages. All day long with the vulnerability in his manipulativeness.

10. We forgive him. READ MORE >

This New and Poisonous Air

by Adam McOmber

BOA Editions, 2011

180 pages / $14  Buy from BOA Editions

Imagine, behind glass or roped off from strangers, a representative sample of your wardrobe, adorning a dummy or hung flat and mummified; perhaps beside it, a selection of your tools—laptop, remote, cell phone; your furniture—the bed you sleep in, the chair you sometimes recline in, the coffee table your ankles once rested on. Your imprint is bound to be very slight on this exhibit: only the “historically significant” have been presented. Truly everyday objects will have been left out (by their very nature, anathema to preservation, longevity). And the tags that explain the place of these things in your life have no connection to how you think of them. Can the weight of habit be calculated in a few lines of type? You must imagine, too, people visiting this exhibit, looking closely before passing on to others, filling in their understanding of you as though you had been an empty vessel, a concept without any clear illustration; not a person at all. Are you there, at the center of the echoes of all those shuffling feet?

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