heft

Laid out against the horizontal landscape of the page, from the very beginning these poems demand from the reader a reorientation, and set out a goal to teach us how to read differently--not only the poems but also the world. What is beautiful and successful here is the way Doyali Islam takes small moments and gives to them an incredible, sometimes aching, heft: the ephemera left in a pocket become a map leading us back to love; an ant observed on the floor finds its way onto a white page--a black mark effectively writing its own poem, 'struggling to interpret its situation'. In each of these poems, Islam makes that struggle for interpretation both wonderful and worthwhile. -- Griffin Poetry Prize Jury Citation heft deftly encompasses both personal and political through [Doyali Islam's] innovative use of a bifurcated poem. Is it two wings built around a white silence? The scales of the balance of justice? The border between self and other? We enter each poem as if into an unknown world, already populated, but ready to welcome us. Come and sit inside these wings. --Philip Metres Islam's distilled, intricate poems are packed with striking images and associative leaps; she writes of a cat 'bent after new thought'--a phrase that fits her poetic method, which is formally inventive . . . Having a burden is also a frequent motif; the grain of rice an ant carries is 'something to heft, heft for nourishment; / something to pain him and free him, at once'--in other words, a metaphor for life itself. --Toronto Star heft is permeated with tenderness--the poems deepen our humanity. How does language achieve something as physical as empathy? That language can achieve this is a kind of mystery, and beauty is inextricable from this mystery. --Anne Michaels, CV2