The Voice of Sheila Chandra, Kazim Ali’s latest collection, profoundly sings. The music in this book is generated by a constellation of fellow artists and history makers that Ali has gathered across time and space.  To name just a few of the holy misfits we encounter, there is Corey Menafee, the former dining hall attendant at Yale, who broke a stained- glass window depicting images of enslaved Africans picking cotton, and Sheila Chandra, an experimental pop vocalist, who had to abruptly stop singing due to a rare condition called burning mouth syndrome. This book is also formally daring, orbiting around three long poems: “Hesperine for David Berger,” a thirteen-page lament against violence and injustice; “The Voice of Sheila Chandra,” a forty-part sonnet sequence summoning Chandra’s voice; and “Phosphorus,” which slides from free verse into a puzzle of letters, inviting readers to participate in a translation-like process.
The speaker’s anger leads to a spiral of questions and a critique of “Western comfort.” Throughout “Hesperine for David Berger,” thoughts collide at a fever pitch amplified by the poem’s lack of punctuation. But in moments of introspection, such as the one above, an absence of punctuation subverts syntax, upending the meaning of words. Ali blurs where some questions begin and end. The effect of this slippage is an interrogation into what God, art, and nationhood are and are not.
By describing Menafee’s action as singing, Ali suspends and elevates this moment in time, as the act of singing a song is slower than the act of breaking glass. Also, by comparing Menafee’s action to singing, Ali conveys the beauty in decisively acting on one’s outrage. In the retelling of the moment, the speaker clarifies that what is violent is the oppressive, racist imagery looming in stained glass, not the choice to disrupt this imagery with a broom. The split-second during which Menafee acts is one that the speaker returns to across the poem. By returning to this instance, the action becomes a powerful refrain, such that the mere mention of shattering or glass in the poem invokes Menafee’s revolutionary song.
As the speaker challenges normative masculinity in the sonnet above, a plosive consonant “p” pulses through the diction: “pounds powdered / Pigment right into the paper.” The absence of punctuation also contributes to a sense of flux. When the “texture of a voice breaks,” the voice could be that of the speaker reinventing manhood or that of the actress screaming in English during her multilingual performance.
Again and again, the speaker in this poem returns to the home that is the body, fundamentally trusting the voice made of “muscles and shape and breath.” Guided by boats at the “mouth of the harbor mouth,” Kazim Ali breaks silence and writes silence into song.
Jenny Johnson is the author of the poetry collection, In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.