The Man in 119

Kazim Ali's latest collection uses a migrant geography to explore how the self moves through grief.

The Man in 119, the latest collection from accomplished poet Kazim Ali, explores loss and absence alongside the human body and the natural world. Here, the tongue becomes a collaboration between human and glacial current—the self, a “tectonic topography of god." Grappling with questions of mortality in the wake of his mother's passing, Ali asks where we go when we leave this world: “earth or sky or memory only." With musicality, these poems build a space for contemplation, offering vignettes of various individuals, memories, and geographies. We learn that in migration, the body moves, reproduces itself through the experience of losing and living still.