Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice (Tupelo Press Lineage Series) - Softcover

Ali, Kazim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932195947 ISBN 13: 9781932195941

Publisher: Tupelo Press, Inc., 2011

Synopsis

To go without food from dawn to dusk for the whole month of Ramadan - how does this feel? What do we become when we deny our major appetites during the hours of daylight, and in what ways does this transform the nights? In these absences, what new presences, what illuminations and revelations arise? After many years of not practicing, acclaimed writer Kazim Ali has re-embraced the Ramadan tradition, and he brings a poet's precision and ardor to these brilliant meditations on an ancient and yet entirely contemporary ritual. Jane Hirshfield has said, "Kazim Ali - a writer whose powers astonish in everything he puts pen to - has made in FASTING FOR RAMADAN a book that is hybrid, peregrine, and deeply, quietly revelatory. Ali's meditations on the month-long ritual fast unfold, across cultures and spiritual practices, the deep meaning of a chosen foregoing. These journal-born pages are both intimate and public, at once ecumenical, particular, daily, and eloquently learned; planted on the deep roots of tradition, they breathe this moment's air. Is it possible for a work to be at once modest and an undeniable tour de force? This book proves: it is."

About this title

Product Description:

Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice Literary Nonfiction. Middle Eastern Studies. Memoir. FASTING FOR RAMADAN is structured as a chronicle of daily meditations, during two cycles of the 30-day rite of daytime abstinence required by Ramadan for purgation and prayer. Estranged in certain ways from his family's cultural traditions when he was younger, Ali has in recent years re-embraced the Ramadan ritual, and brings to this rediscovery... Full description

About the Author:

Kazim Ali is author of two volumes of poetry, THE FAR MOSQUE (Alice James Books, 2005) and The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008), four books of prose the novels QUINN'S PASSAGE (BlazeVOX Books, 2004) and THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SETH (Etruscan Press, 2009); a collection of critical writing, Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence (University of Michigan Press, 2010), and the inspirational memoir FASTING FOR RAMADAN (Tupelo Press, 2011) as well as a mixed-genre book, Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan University Press, 2009), finalist for the Ohioana Book Award for Poetry and the Lantern Award for Memoir. Born to Indian parents living in England and raised in Canada and the U.S., Ali has worked as a political organizer, lobbyist, yoga instructor, and professor. Founding editor of Nightboat Books, he now teaches at Creative Writing and Literature at Oberlin College and in the University of Southern Maine's low-residency M.F.A. program.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tupelo Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1932195947
• ISBN 13: 9781932195941
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208