Book description
This groundbreaking, transgenre work--part detective story, part
literary memoir, part imagined past--is intensely autobiographical and
confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and
backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of
coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family
strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text
is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from
discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics,
geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence
plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally
"autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of
writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and
fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations.
Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside
such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life,
and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A
reader's companion is available at http://brightfelonreader. site.
wesleyan. edu/ "Bright Felon is a troubling work of unrelieved
sadness and relentless self-examination and yet, for all that, it is
also a monument to a yearning for oblivion, a desire so unimpeachable at
its center it reminds us that there are no happy endings--only intervals
of relief."--Tyrone Williams, The Volta KAZIM ALI is the author
of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque (2004) and The Fortieth Day
(2008). He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin
College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the University
of Southern Maine. He is one of the founding editors of Nightboat Books.
