Beside the Muezzin's Call & Beyond the Harem's Veil

This chapbook has the heft of a full-length book, thanks to Saba Syed Razvi's gift for weaving the personal and the political, fact and mysticism, sensuality and tenderness and a fearsome intellect into one incantatory work whose spell I return to again and again: Give me the given, the gotten, the green. Razvi gives generously, sharing the sustenance of a faith rich in history and ritual (Greensweet / henna in sugar-oil and eucalyptus, / I trace / in hair-thin coils, / along my upturned paling palms), singing the zagreet and the wail and the worried echo, the sound of the shudder under the warplane's war cry. Read this slim yet courageous bulwark against the man who judges what is ours and what is other. -Sarah Rosenthal, author of Lizard, Manhatten, and Estelle Meaning Star Luscious writing: fruit plucked, pomegranate dripping, ripe curves of a peach, sticky white milk from broken stems. But this is language, and this lusciousness asks questions, in and through the words, about desire, about the spin in which the wind catches us, about thought that might become a flame to burn down heaven. Answers sound here, too, in our failure to create vessels to testify our deeds, because our deaths are solitary. These poems are classical in the sense that HD's poetry is classical, i.e. seeing through the real and the now to themes that have always been, looking at maps and seeing Each split hemisphere will open / like a sliced sun. Classical in the sense that their light has always been here, bright as a burst / explosive. Classical in the sense of our ongoing engagement with gender and identity, in and through time, that motivates and queries and fails and illuminates us all. Razvi asks us, near the end of the book, to find me. I will return to these poems, often, and find, and find, and find. -Charles Alexander, author of near or random acts and Certain Slants, director of Chax Press