'The Naming by Aisyah Shah Idil is full of surprises as this remarkable debut collection pulls apart the threads of liminality and traces their paths across culture, family, and environment. Shah Idil’s experimental sense provides a transformative frame for an uncompromising lyricism, pushing outwards beyond the pages and prodding at the edges of memory and oblivion. Shah Idil’s poetry is magical and relentless, brimming with love.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (2nd ed.).
'I am always struck by the immense variability of human experience; the little and big differences that amount to the conditions of our individual and collective identities. The task of poetry is to write this nebulous, subjective humanity, while also probing the inefficiencies of the language we have to create and understand something so frustratingly out of grasp. How to apply an ostensibly tangible tool to an intangible quality? For instance, if we write emotion, or an emotion, as a word, it becomes incased in the materiality of language, becomes material itself, and is removed from the intangibilities of its initial feeling. Feeling is of course still there, but its nuance is limited to the shape and familiarity of the word, to the different ways we know the word in our different real world encounters.' (Introduction)
'I am always struck by the immense variability of human experience; the little and big differences that amount to the conditions of our individual and collective identities. The task of poetry is to write this nebulous, subjective humanity, while also probing the inefficiencies of the language we have to create and understand something so frustratingly out of grasp. How to apply an ostensibly tangible tool to an intangible quality? For instance, if we write emotion, or an emotion, as a word, it becomes incased in the materiality of language, becomes material itself, and is removed from the intangibilities of its initial feeling. Feeling is of course still there, but its nuance is limited to the shape and familiarity of the word, to the different ways we know the word in our different real world encounters.' (Introduction)
