Staff Picks: Fasting for Ramadan

Taylor recommends Fasting for Ramadan by Kazim Ali:

How do we define family? Traditions? Vacations? Shared Meals? Shared beliefs? How do we draw the line between faith & understanding? Food & body? The SuperNatural & anxiety? What makes words into poetry? Is it the not letting go? Is it the rain? Or lack thereof?

This book in its most simple form is a diary. OR> An exploration of exploration. OR> Experiencing an experience. OR> Can we be forgotten? OR> Once I met a man who I was sure was me myself but also him himself & that, though we had never met, had never seen one another, had always been separated, we had never been separate. OR> I never sleep because night is when I eat. OR> Maybe we have to be truly empty to understand emptiness?

PART 1: THE MIND’S REACHING OUT

One feels, at the end of a day of fasting, like a branch of a tree or a bone bleached in the sun…
Sometimes even your own language disappears…
Tell me the difference between entity & eternity…
How Small & tender the ego is…
I wonder if I will always be like this…
I’ve always thought of a poem as an open door…
But holiness is everywhere, in the ordinary days as well…

PART 2: GROUNDED IN THE BODY

White sunlight comes through the window…
What is cleaner than fire…
These are drugs I take…
Each morning I am up early enough to look at the moon…
The fast takes us from a self-oriented universe into creation…
My body is a transitional site, a holding pattern…
I dream to come back, to have it be really mine again, my lovely brother, my corpse, my shield…

Elegant & intimate; you won’t want this book to end.