Hussain Ahmed

Blue Exodus, Hussain Ahmed's second full-length poetry collection, was selected by Rajiv Mohabir as the winner of The 2022 Orison Poetry Prize. About the collection, Mohabir writes, "I come away with the specters of the living and passed, asking me what it means to live as a story lives, to write a life's ghost into poem." This book charts a heart's history of home, war, dispossession, and displacement, as well as the human solidarity and sacred rituals that remain despite the loss of so much else. Populated by moons and oceans and birds, as well as missiles and gun magazines, these lush poems carry profound grief but also adamantine hope.

Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile explores the role of silence in a time of war. The war Hussain Ahmed accounts here is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost. The experimental poems track grief as it extends from the personal “I” to a larger community that grapples to find connections with places that are no longer in existence. These are poems that must resist the danger of fear in order to ensure that the victims are not forgotten, resulting in a powerful result is a collection of survival stories that insist on being told.

Radio waves, headless mules, forbidden books, lost cities, dark moon missions, lousy philosophers, Sycorax, Selena, Lizzie Borden: FLAPPERHOUSE #16