"An Inventory of Infinite Traces" Gramsci
Kandahar Behave or the sleeping Alexander will reclaim your lungs. Kandahar – Was once a cube of sugar Refusing to dissolve in the sea. It became a city from sheer stubbornness. Alexander naively said, “This is my land!” causing the earth to giggle and birth him a wife Rukhshana. (Roxanna if you prefer). […]
MoreThis summer I’ve had the great luxury of time and the gift of an iPhone 4s. So, I’ve photo documented the process of copyediting the late Lebanese poet, Nadia Tueni’s (1935-1983) poetry collection: The Blond Texts + The Age of Embers translated from the French by Amir Parsa. The photos are from June-July 2012 and […]
MoreWriters are for the most part lone wolfs, notorious for hibernating in order to release the “jinns” inside them via writing. However, this year, I found myself more than ever involved in collaborations that expanded my community of Asian American and Central Asian American authors, performers and intellectuals. Since I was bedazzled by the Hipstamatic […]
MoreLast week, poet David Meltzer and his wife Julie came to visit. What’s cooler than a poet visiting to talk about the “Beat” movement in American poetry? Coming in a shirt that says “DownBeat”! I’ve been reading Beat Thing and will post up some audio clips from the talk (depending on how fancy I can […]
MoreYes, you are seeing right! Kohl pencil and a pen shared the panel table with Fawzia Afzal Khan (author, Lahore With Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani Style), Priyanka Motaparthy (Human Rights Watch), Purvi Shah (Moderator/author, Terrain Tracks) and me. Beauty and Power all on one table. (We didn’t know whose kohl pencil that was […]
MoreI’m packing up these beauties to take over to the Brooklyn College Library Zine Collections Archive. Earlier this week Alycia Sellie from the library contacted Robert Booras and I about submitting our zines. Although, at first I thought I had lost my old zines in my move — I was ecstatic after finding this humble […]
MoreOne Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American writers EDITED BY Zohra Saed AND Sahar Muradi (The University of Arkansas Press, 2010) A remarkable stand-out anthology offering poetry, fiction, essays and selections from the blogs of photographers Masood Kamandy and Gazelle Samizay. Editors Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi state in their introduction, “This […]
MoreAnd one more lovely interview about One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature. Thank you Leonard Schwartz who asked such great questions. Cross Cultural Poetics (Seattle, WA)
MoreUpsetting Brooklyn by Eleanor J. Bader When Zohra Saed was a child, her father frequently spoke about two things: Islam and Afghanistan, her family’s country of origin. She found his stories riveting. In fact, she loved them so much that she started writing stories and poems of her own. “I’d go to the elementary school […]
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