Description
When the speaker’s Iranian grandmother who read fortunes passes away, she begins to understand that she’s inherited her grandmother’s gifts. Without an initiation to forecasting, the speaker is left to make sense of her history and her future through signs and experiences she can’t explain. The poems excavate the past to make sense of loss and inheritance, of magic and fate. Teeming with foxes and birds, Malak translates what’s seen and unseen, and what can be heard in the quiet.
About the author
Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of Paper Cotton Leather, Malak, and Dear Outsiders and is the coauthor of Book of Levitations. Her prose has appeared in The Rumpus, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, The Collagist, and others. She cofounded and coedits Josephine Quarterly and teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University.
Praise for Malak
Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Malak is a splendidly written book that considers where metaphysical themes and elliptical lyric intersect. At its core, this collection inquires about spiritual inheritance and relationships through the skillful deployment of images that wrap the reader in their clutch. Sadre-Orafai’s poems, rooted in memory, mourning and honor, are hauntingly surreal yet solidly material.
—Airea D. Matthews, author of Simulacra and Bread and Circus
In Malak, Jenny Sadre-Orafai takes your hand and walks you through magnificent worlds where futures appear in coffee grounds and become a “language of residue,” into the habitats of snakes, foxes, and girls, and a dream can appear nine times. Familial cycles and cultural identities are rendered in enchanting images and lines. Jenny Sadre-Orafai makes the tales of bloodlines fresh and the wild earth new.
—Wendy C. Ortiz, author of Excavation, Hollywood Notebook, and Bruja
Invoking talisman, totem, fortune, and spell, Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Malak abides in the rich world of lineage and divination. Listening back to the potent augury of the poet’s grandmother and forward to the intuition of her daughter, these are poems that move in circular time enacting “how our whole gold life is happening.” Malak makes a startling lyric music with its nested selves and layered voices, its locks and keys and teeth in the dark, polishing to an ontological shine what we know and what can be retrieved from the future.
—Jennifer K. Sweeney, author of Salt Memory, How to Live on Bread and Music, Little Spells, and Foxlogic, Fireweed
