Kazim Ali visited the Colorado Review production house in Fort Collins, Colorado, to talk fragmentation, spirituality, queerness, social justice, and land with Associate Editor River Grabowski over tea. 
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including several volumes of poetry, novels, and translations. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books include a volume of three long poems, entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra, and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water.
River Grabowski: Kazim, thank you so much for joining us today—I admire you so much as a writer. To start, I’d love to know about your writing practice these days.
Kazim Ali: Well, I still write in my journal almost every day. I don’t necessarily have a particular project in mind, really never, actually, for poetry—it always emerges from a sentence, or a phrase, or a line, or an image, or a sound. So I’m not sure what’s next for me. My mother passed away in May of last year, and I’ve written very little since then, apart for three poems I wrote immediately after she passed, and one each day at the Community of Writers Retreat at the end of June. And then I wrote a poem in January. So from May until now, March, seven plus three plus one: eleven little poems. And I don’t know if they’re any good, or what they’re going to be…
So, in other words, I’m probably entering a period of silence—well, not necessarily silence, because I seem to produce a lot out of silence. I’ve never really been silent. But the condition is silence, and the condition is newness. However I wrote before, or whatever I wrote about before, now feels undone, as my life was undone by her departure. So I have to figure out who I am as a person, and I guess that automatically also means who am I as a writer?
RG: Wow, I’m sorry to hear about your mother. It sounds like an intense period.
KA: Yes, and it’s in process.
RG: I know you’ve written a lot about silence as a concept, so it’s interesting to hear you talk about the condition of silence versus creation out of it—
KA: Oh, you didn’t take any tea! I’m finishing all of it—you better pour some!
RG: Ah! You’re right, thank you. Anyway, I saw you were published for the first time in the Colorado Review in 2004 with your poem “Travel,” which appears in your book The Far Mosque. Then, I found your most recent poems in the Colorado Review from 2023, “Prayer” and “Trop,” published nearly twenty years later! I am wondering if the differences of those poems might speak to your journey more largely as a writer.
The first poem “Travel” captures an experience of emptiness, nomadism, and a kind of youthful zealotry, reading as unincorporated and gestural even in its plainer, more traditional syntax. The Georges Braque quote you use in the poem—I will not plan the painting but rather lay paint directly on the canvas. The painting is not finished until the original idea has been obliterated—felt very appropriate as you sought to fold your body and language in with the world, discovering yourself through devastating change, as you “move through / obliterated.”
& then the poems in our 2023 issue are quite different, operate more like language poetry: the prosody, the prayer, the speech beyond one’s speech in the vowel. Reading these poems, your language feels more elemental, more integrated and succinct on the syntax level, more comfortable entertaining illegibility. I’m wondering if this might be a result of the hard-won wisdom you’ve accrued, a polyphony of origin that found a way to speak with unity. What do you think? Is this a fair assessment?
KA: Well, I always liked the idea of speaking in tongues. In “Travel,” the quote from Braque doesn’t just appear at the beginning of the poem, but rather it’s woven through the text of the poem itself. So, the grammar breaks and matches up—”move through” was my line and “obliterated” was the last word of his quote about the painting. The poem is not complete until the original idea has been obliterated.
And the later poems “Trop” and “Prayer” came from a sequence that I wrote in the early days of the pandemic when I was fastened in space, because we were all at home under quarantine. I got interested in English not as a fixed set of idioms but as a manifestation of many thousands of years of evolving languages. One of the reasons I love English the most—I’ve studied many languages—is because English itself is a meeting place. It has a rich lineage from Latin and German, and many other word languages have come into it, in many cases whole words. So, very broadly, I became interested if I could write a poem in English that was unintelligible—that’s where those poems came from. They have English, they have Scots, they have some French and Spanish, they have middle French, middle Norse, middle Scots, and contemporary idioms as well. I even use the word bae in one of the one of those poems. The entire sequence appeared in a small chapbook called Crib and Cage that came out from PANK a little while ago. And ten out of fourteen of them appeared in Sukun, which is my New and Selected Poems. That work was a natural progression from the poems of the title sequence of my book, The Voice of Sheila Chandra, made of forty sonnets. They’re still intelligible as poems in English, but they take away punctuation and use the line break against the grain of the phrase, so it becomes very confusing to read. I even broke that down further in a poem called “Phosphorus,” featured in The Voice of Sheila Chandra, which is punctuated by word grids made of an individual letter, then a space, and so on; so you’d have to assemble the whole word as you read across, which then continues in little ticker tapes running down the page. When I reprinted that poem in the New and Selected Poems, I only reprinted the word grids instead of the whole poems. It was a way of foregrounding the experimentation—for the individual person who’s using language to be separated from familiarity with the language. When we study a new language, we are automatically unfamiliar with it. But what are the ways that we can defamiliarize ourselves in our own English language?
RG: Yes, absolutely! I appreciate that so much about your work, that you allow language and experience to exist in fragments. For me, it simultaneously defamiliarizes and creates an incredible intimacy through its recontextualization.
KA: I think of Olga Broumas, who is a poet and a body worker; she trained as a dancer, and later became a yoga teacher and a massage therapist. She taught at Brandeis for many years, publishing four books of poetry between the early 1970s and 1995. She did a collaboration with another artist and body worker T Begley, called Sappho’s Gymnasium, which Nightboat did a reprint of. The book is made of small, little verse fragments; some of them are just one single line. They take on the fragmented form of Sappho: small utterances amidst silence. There’s one line I really love: “Preumbilical eros preclassical brain.” To me, to be preumbilical means the complete merging of the body of the child with the body of the mother before it separates from the uterine wall and has an umbilical cord, and the notion of an eros of a mother and a child, the intimacy of that bodily connection. And then preclassical brain means, maybe, how the brain worked before language or expression, or before rhetoric, or before logic and argumentation, when we were all impulse. There’s a dark side of that, because there’s animal rage—in the Biblical story the very first thing that happens after humans leave the garden is murder, right? That’s the first action. But what were the potentials, also, for love and connection?
So I think about language as a form of distance, putting the nature of something into semiotic shape instead of the direct experience of a thing. Plato talks about this with the illusion of the cave, where he says we’re not actually looking at the world, we’re just looking at the reflection of the world. And ancient Indian philosophy, Samkhya Philosophy and Vedantic Philosophy, understand humans as compromised by memory. So we don’t experience the world as it is, immediately; we use our past experiences to define the present. The goal of yoga is to be able to experience the world in the present as it happens without the shackles of past experience determining your responses and reactions.
For my purposes, with language and the form of the poem, I asked, could the poem happen in time, immediately? How do you do that, when we’re all so familiar with the words? Gertrude Stein said she wanted to make words new, but she didn’t know how to because they can never be purely abstract or purely new; they always carry the baggage of their meaning. That’s something I really struggled with, from the very beginning, from my earliest published work in The Far Mosque and onwards. I always wanted the poem to be brand new somehow. And I did very, very little normatively narrative poetry up until my book Inquisition where I wanted to lean more into the presence of the world—poems like “The Earthquake Days” or “Marie’s Crisis.” But I’ve left that behind. Now, I’m going back into the nonsensical, the way a child uses language.
RG: I’m definitely here for the nonsensical, I’m glad you’re back! However, I’m curious to hear about your recent experience of writing the more traditionally narrative nonfiction book Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water after writing so richly in the tradition of the fragment.
KA: Well, Northern Light was very different. I felt a very strong sense of responsibility to tell the story of the Pimicikamak people that the dam on the Nelson River affected. When I first went up there, I was going on spec from a Canadian news magazine that expressed interest in the story, so I went thinking I was going to write a seven- or eight-thousand-word piece. I was keeping a very careful journal while I was there, and I thought, I’ll write the magazine piece, and then I’ll write some poems out of this, too.
Though when I came back, I was transcribing my notes and realized I didn’t want to separate out the more poetic sections from the more narrative sections—I just wanted them to be one manuscript. And so, it became a manuscript of about 20,000 words. I thought I would publish it that way—it had this notebook, fragment quality to it. In the end, though, as I revised it, and as worked with the editor at Milkweed, it became clear I had a greater responsibility to lean into the journalistic side of the work. I couldn’t “just be poetic about it,” I had to also tell the real story, the real impact; I inserted more character descriptions and more descriptions of the land.
There was also the question of the historical background that most people, neither in Canada, nor in the United States, really knew about the histories of how Indigenous people in Canada were dispossessed. So it took on a life of its own, and the project began to dictate how it would be told; it lost more and more of its self-consciously poetic elements and became a hybrid book of journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, as well as some history. One little fragment of a lineated quatrain that appears late in the book, when I’m flying home from Cross Lake Airport back to Winnipeg, which is one of the last remnants of poetry in the book. I left it there as a kind of homage to how the book started.
RG: It’s beautiful. I remember reading in your book Bright Felon about how you wrote on stacks of revolving notecards to ventriloquize the ghosts of past experience and syntax as you grappled with a new physical and language context. I’m curious, how did your experience returning to this important place of your childhood and being with the Pimicikamak people influence your language as you came back?
KA: It absolutely did. The Cree language used there is very connected to the landscape. The words they use for different objects have, like many Indigenous languages—including Cherokee, Diné, and Navajo—a causal relationship, meaning the verbs are related to the nouns. So, the sun suns. It doesn’t “shine,” it “suns.” Cree is not precisely like that, but does have that close relationship to the specificity of the landscape: the types of trees and the types of weather, etc.
English doesn’t hold that, but Cree does. It’s also a very lyrical spoken language to hear. I suppose a comparison would be between something like Italian or Portuguese and English, where there’s a musicality to the language. And when Cree speakers speak in English, they speak English with a lilt, the way an Italian speaker might; it was very beautiful to be immersed in that.
There’s a great tenderness to the people there, too. I mean, they opened their hearts to me, as the son of the person who built the dam. They had no reason to welcome me the way they did. And my relationship with them continues, staying in touch with many of the people in the book for years after it came out; new people from Cross Lake have reached out to me as well. I’m going to Winnipeg in a couple of weeks to go visit one of the women who I only mentioned briefly in the book, because I didn’t meet her on that trip: Rita, and her husband Tommy. They are activists in the community that I heard about when I was there but didn’t have a chance to meet. Rita and I came to be in touch over the last year and a half, Zooming together, but we haven’t met in person, so I’m excited to meet her when I go.
It’s not as if the book was written just to tell the stories of them and turn the page—my involvement with them and that community is really important to me. I was going go back sooner, but COVID came and interrupted those plans. On this trip to Winnipeg, I thought I might have been able to go up to Jenpeg, but it’s complicated to go in the winter. I’m hoping that maybe over the summer I can take a trip.
RG: I’m curious to hear any insights about the reception of Northern Light, either in the United States or Canada.
I didn’t do a lot of touring because it came out during COVID, though I did a fair amount by Zoom—okay, I did a lot by Zoom for that book. It’s weird because it was all recorded and lives on YouTube; there are more readings of me from the pandemic on YouTube than any other period in my life!
But anyway, it was received really well. I mean, it’s a side of the story that Indigenous people always knew, but Canadian settlers, including myself, didn’t know the story. Even though many Indigenous people have been telling the story, because I’m an immigrant and a settler, and a brown immigrant and a brown settler, it became interesting for me to tell a story which other settlers could relate to. I tried to always remain conscious that I was telling the story of another community, though what I’ve always wanted is for Indigenous writers to be telling their own stories. For all the release readings I did for that book, I invited Indigenous writers from Canada and the United States to do those events with me. I did events with Sherwin Bitsui, Layli Long Soldier, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Danielle Geller—it became a way for me to continue the conversation with Indigenous writers on issues that affect Indigenous peoples.
They were great conversations. Billy-Ray asked me, “Why is it you that gets to write this book?”, and we talked it through. Yes, this is my experience, and there are ways other settlers relate to it, because I’m also a settler. However, I also recognize the power of my position, that I, writing the book, have to be respectful to the experience of the people I’m writing about. I also have to make sure I’m not the only one who gets to tell this story—that people from that community should also tell the story, and that I and others have the responsibility to help those writers gain their platform and get their story out. I always hoped that Cathy Merrick would write her own book, or Jackson, or Rita, for example; that may be coming in the future. In fact, I’m going to talk to Rita about that when I go and see her and connect her with someone who can help her to shape the book and write her experiences.
RG: I hope we get to see that book. I’m also curious to know how writing Northern Light and ushering it into the world shaped your relationship to land, as you’ve written extensively of your own experiences of lostness and being a nomad, about not having a place.
KA: It was weird to return to that place that had been so much a part of my own imagination as a child and having forgotten it. However, being there again, I felt this strong sense of belonging, there was no denying it. However, I do love the warm weather and living in California now—I don’t ever want to go back to winter! When I was there, it was May, and it was cold, and the water was all frozen. But I really did have that sense of belonging—instinctual—from my earliest experiences. That’s why what’s happening in Gaza now is so horrible, because whatever the politics behind it, the children are being shaped by these days, and they will carry them with them for the rest of their lives.
RG: I agree, it’s devastating. So then what do you do with that, either with Gaza or your own experiences in childhood?
KA: As for me, I had a sense of loss that has since dissipated a bit. I did come from a place. I do belong to a place. My family wandered across the globe, from India, to Pakistan, to England, to India, to Canada, to the United States. And then I kept going—I lived in New York, I lived in Albany, I lived in Washington, DC, I lived in Palestine for a little while, off and on. I lived in France off and on, and I lived in Ohio for over ten years, oh, and Pennsylvania. It changed me.
First of all, I’ve never held on to the people in my life. I’m still friends with everybody, but it’s not as if there are people in my daily life who I’ve known for twenty years and seen their kids grow up. I missed all those experiences. When I moved to California in early 2019, I connected with the place very strongly, and the West more generally. I used to joke with everybody when I first moved there: I said, “I’m never going to live east of Denver again. Denver is the farthest east I will ever go for the rest of my life.”
I fell in love with the West, and even here, I am a settler, a settler in the West. I wrote a poem about that feeling in my recent book Sukun. It’s a poem called “Junipero Serra Arrives.” Junipero Serra was the inquisitor from Spain who came to Christianize the Kumeyaay people, and then he went up and down the coast of California trying to Christianize other Indigenous people. I thought of myself as him, arriving in this beautiful, paradisiacal place that I was in love with—and it is still occupied lands. I have a responsibility to not only acknowledge Kumeyaay claims to the land but recognize myself as a visitor and commit myself to the social and political work that the Kumeyaay nation is doing, still, to this day. So I’m committed to the Pimicikamak in Manitoba, but I also know that I have responsibilities to the Kumeyaay in California as well.
RG: So how are you, in a deeper sense, understanding your social or political role as a writer in the world right now?
KA: Yeah, it’s tough. I lived in Palestine off and on for five years, going out in the winters, and going out in the summers—I never lived there full time, but I was there teaching yoga and training yoga teachers. I’m trying to write about that experience and have a book that is pretty much complete. However, around December, I stopped working on it; it became complicated. Amidst the ongoing trauma of the military destruction of Gaza, why should I be focused on a time nearly ten years back, working on teaching contemplative practices in the West Bank? I felt like it was more responsible to focus on working towards a ceasefire. Then, hopefully, this book will have a moment to show American and Western audiences what life in Palestine is like, and also speak to people about the importance of contemplative traditions as a part of social justice work. So it has a bunch of different angles—it’s also about being queer, being a queer Muslim in America, being a queer Muslim in Palestine. So, if I had a New Year’s resolution for 2024, it would be to finish this book and get it out into the world. I think it’s important story to tell.
RG: I hope to read it soon. Perhaps this is a good moment to bring up a quote from your book Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine: “It seems that we in our contemporary moment of scientific, poetic, erotic knowledge—teetering on the edge of disaster with the real possibility of planetary, spiritual and sexual death—have a chance to taste original knowledge, to move into an actually new understanding: of ourselves, of the universe itself. How does matter hold together and fly apart?” Expanding on that quote, I suppose my question is, What possibility do you see for new understanding in this moment of disaster?
KA: I think art and self-development are a part of it, for all people, but you can’t create art and have self-development unless you have political sovereignty and individual freedom, right? So political activism must be a part of any artistic practice. Similarly, artistic practice should also be involved in the way we think about our political action. They’re just not unrelated, and we owe to ourselves to take care of ourselves, but we also owe to other people our care of them.
It’s so easy right now to feel hopeless because the system that we’re a part of has let us down. More and more people are asking the question, What is the agenda of the American state, of the establishment here, that an entire people could be so disposable? It’s traumatic. So you see things like this kid, Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself—to come to that point of despair, where there’s nothing else to do, when any work that you do is failing, you know? We failed, we’re failing, every day we’re failing. And yet we have to somehow continue and always remember the system let us down—never go back to normal. So a ceasefire happens, fine. Then it’s time to work for the liberation of the people, and not to trust what we’ve built here any differently, because we have our own history: the Indigenous people in Oklahoma that were murdered over the oil claims, the African people who were enslaved to create the wealth of this country, and the Chicanx people whose labor is exploited to create the wealth of California. The immediate victory is to have a ceasefire, the immediate victory is to change voting laws, the immediate victory is to gain political rights. But the broader vision is that this system is anti-human. Neoliberal capitalism is anti-human, it’s anti-Black, we know that. It’s anti-Indigenous. It’s anti-queer, it’s anti-woman. It’s anti-human. It’s terrible. So, I don’t know what’s next. I’m not sure. I don’t know how we do it. But I know we must at least recognize that much.
RG: It is. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about how queerness might have a part in this political work.
KA: Queer, as Judith Butler and others have talked about queerness, is an oppositional perspective: to be queer is to be against military violence. To be queer is to be in favor of the individual right to love and partner and be cared for. To be queer means to believe that there should be universal health care. You know, we don’t need gay marriage if we have universal health care and a fair and just economic system. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about whether we can get married or not. We don’t need marriage of any kind if we have social laws that actually take care of citizens for who they are and not who they’re paired up with, or who they have children with. The people in power have always wanted to control the family structures of poor people, including their reproductive freedom, because they have to keep them disempowered. That’s what marriage and inheritance are about. So, to be queer is different than being gay, which just describes your sexuality. Queer is a whole ball of wax. To be queer is a worldview.
RG: Speaking of worldviews, I wanted to ask you about this definition of God I found captivating in your book Bright Felon. You write, “There is a place where the flesh of the body—the mind being ensconced within its cells and chemical reactions—and the self of the ‘immortal spirit’ do not meet each other; a gap in each person, a place we do not connect, and that, this lack, the earthly place we cannot get to being a metaphor for that, is a place of God.” Here, you don’t necessarily describe God, but rather the place of God. And, significantly, that this place is an experience of insufficiency, or as lack, disconnect. Can you talk about how you understand the relationship between place, the divine, and the queer body?
KA: Well, my friend Rachel Tzvia Back, who is an Israeli poet, who lives in the Galilee, told me once that one of the Hebrew names of God is “The Place,” that God was the place. And so the notion of holy places, she was explaining to me, is kind of sacrilegious. In that way, a synagogue, or even a mosque, is really only a place where people meet to pray. It’s not in and of itself a holy place. Some mosques become sacred because of a saint or someone who’s buried there—the grave makes it holy. But the nature of it as a mosque is not holy. And a synagogue, I don’t think they bury people in them, but it’s a meeting place. It might be sacred because it’s a meeting place, but it doesn’t have an inherent sacred nature. This is different than Christian or Hindu temples, or even Buddhist shrines, though you might put “sacred” in quotes because there’s a different sense of what that means. But in Christianity and Hinduism, and maybe in other religions, I don’t know, there is such a thing as consecration. In Islam, and in Judaism, the texts are consecrated, the written word is consecrated, but the place is not.
And so she found an irony in the Western Wall becoming this site of pilgrimage, because that’s something that did not previously exist in Judaism. The notion of the lost temple, the destroyed temple, was very metaphorical for a long time. So the creation of the modern state of Israel took the metaphor of diaspora that was at the heart of Jewish mysticism away. There are Jewish people who are secular and committedly anti-Zionist for their own political and secular reasons, and there are other people who, through a deep understanding of Judaism, are anti-Zionist, because they feel like this modern, secular, militarized state is contrary to the values of Judaism as a diasporic people. That’s an argument for the community to have—I don’t have an actual political opinion as it relates to that. But I’m interested in what it brings up philosophically about the relationship between place and the sacred, or the determinedness of God having a place.
Maybe God is a metaphor, I’m not sure anymore, but it seems logical to err on the side of belief. I’m thinking about the philosophical concept of Pascal’s wager: if, after everything’s over, and you believed in God, and God does exist, then you’re good. And if you’re not . . . well, you know what I mean. If there is a God, it seems reasonable that it doesn’t really matter what we think as small little mortal people. At the end of the day, I don’t believe in anything remotely like heaven or hell or judgment or any of that. It’s also illogical if you think about an all-powerful, creative force binding the universe together, it makes no sense at all, that individual people could have changed anything with what we believe. With what we do? That’s another question. But not what we believe.
So, when I talked about God as a lack—it’s also 15 years since I wrote that book, so my own ideas have evolved and changed—I meant God as what we can’t define, what we can’t explain, what we can’t ever know. It also seems reasonable to me that if there is somehow some universal force tying the universe together, That, with a capital “T,” would be so incomprehensible by a human brain to understand its nature, to understand how it “thinks.” It’s just Beyond, beyond with a capital “B.” So it now seems wisest to me, fifteen years later and after many of the things I wrote in Bright Felon and Resident Alien and other books, to live your life according to… I mean, the golden rule is solid! Be kind to people, don’t hurt other people, don’t kill them. There’s just some basic things. As far as moral codes go, the rest of it is all window dressing.
And as Americans, we’re just responsible for so much. No matter how morally good of people we are, our hands are just sullied with violence. So I think it’s way better to focus on that than the fine points of the nature of God and the afterlife and all of that. As Fanny Howe said, “If this life isn’t enough, then an afterlife won’t be enough.” So, if we don’t fix this world, if we don’t try to reconcile with each other, if we don’t try to be kinder, to nourish each other, to protect children, I don’t think anything else matters.
RG: That’s powerful. I read an interview on The Rumpus where you described yourself at one point as “ecstatically wounded,” marked by the dichotomy of being gay and Muslim.
KA: Yeah, it’s terrible. It was terrible.
RG: How does one heal from an ecstatic wound?
KA: Well, I had to run away, right? I had to get away. Ani DiFranco says, The mistakes of each generation will just fade like a radio station, if we drive out of range. And it’s sad, because I left a lot behind. I had to choose, and it was myself. So yes, I was ecstatically wounded. And it doesn’t heal. You just live.
RG: That’s beautiful and hard to hear for me at once.
KA: Sure. It’s hard to hear. It’s hard to say.
RG: Well, I really appreciate your writing that at least gives a name to it.
KA: Thank you.
RG: Okay, a final question for you. As I mentioned before, your work is so embodied, spiritual, and often autobiographical. I am curious, how have you managed that sort of work in institutions or a larger culture that might not value that kind of knowledge or respect what it requires of a person?
KA: Ultimately, I’ve had a very private life. As a writer, I work on things for a long time, and I don’t share them as I’m going along. When it does come time to share them, I’m grateful, in a way, to have had the career that I’ve had, to have been able to share my work with people, be published, and hear from people who’ve read my writing. But I also work very hard to disconnect from an attachment to those feelings because I feel like it might compromise my ability to be true to whatever is next.
For example, when Bright Felon came out, people really loved that form, but then I very consciously moved away from it in the book that immediately followed it, Sky Ward. Many people expressed surprise, thinking I was going to continue down that road, and I did eventually go back to it in my book Silver Road that was a kind of spiritual sequel to Bright Felon. In fact, I wanted to call it Silver Road: Autobiography and Cities, sharing a subtitle with Bright Felon, but it didn’t work out with the publisher. My novel that’s coming out, Indian Winter, is also a kind of spiritual sequel to Bright Felon. So some day, I envision publishing Bright Felon, Silver Road, and Indian Winter in one volume called Autobiography and Cities—Bright Felon under the sign of poetry, Silver Road under the sign of essay, and Indian Winter under the sign of fiction. It’s three different genres but governed by the same obsession: to know oneself in place. It is also a part one, part two, and part three in my mind. So anyway, there are things I’d still like to achieve.
I like not having commercial concerns. While I feel incredibly blessed for having been able to be published by the presses I’ve published with and have my books get out there the way they’ve gotten out there, I’m grateful for a certain level of inattention that has allowed me to operate and just keep doing what I want, what I believe in. Right? Because I’m an Aries. I mean, I love attention. I think if I was too lauded I might become spoiled by that.
RG: That’s beautiful. I laud you. You’ve been wonderful, Kazim. It was incredible to meet and talk with you today.
KA: Yes, thank you. And thanks for the tea and the non-settlement hummus!
River Grabowski is an associate editor at the Colorado Review, an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction, and a writing instructor. Prior to their work at Colorado State University, they were a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and worked as a Spanish-English literary translator in Querétaro, México.