From the Bible to the Quaraan, the fortieth day symbolizes the last moment before deliverance, a moment in time when a supplicant or prophet or stormbeaten passenger knows there is no state "after," but finally accepts the present state as a permanent one.

In The Fortieth Day, Kazim Ali follows the fractured narratives and moving lyrics of his debut collection, The Far Mosque, with a deeply spiritual and meditative book exploring the rhetoric of prayer.

Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and raised in an Islamic household. He holds degrees from the University at Albany and New York University. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

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“The reader will see that such a desire infuses language with a passion for breathing and utterance equally.”—Fanny Howe

“A beautifully cadenced and charmed performance by a young writer of great soul and promise.”—Carole Maso

The Disappearance of Seth tells the interlocking stories of five New Yorkers, stumbling through their lives in the aftermath of the events of September 11 and connected by the paths of two figures—Seth, an alienated young man struggling to come to terms with his own penchant for violence, and Layla, an Iraqi artist who fled the violence of the first Gulf War and made a new home for herself in New York City. Written by a Muslim American, The Disappearance of Seth features characters both Muslim and non-Muslim, American and non-American in an arresting portrait of life in America at the beginning of the millennium. A lyrical, hypnotic narrative reminiscent of Sherman Alexie or Junot Díaz, it attempts to historicize the political events of recent years with the personal struggles of its protagonists.

Kazim Ali is the author of two poetry collections and the novel Quinn’s Passage. He teaches at Oberlin College and the Stonecoast MFA program and is a founding editor of Nightboat Books.

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This groundbreaking, trans-genre 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....