Exit Wounds

“Reading Exit Wounds is an experience akin to traversing, wine in hand, landscapes of oceans and mountains, cities and towns—meeting people, sweating in the heat. The poet is a wanderer compelled by the longing for home, the passion to belong. To belong without question. Without proof. To exercise one’s own free will to arrive in a place or to leave as the heart desires. In this witnessing of a lifetime, the poet has wandered in and out of the tribulations of migration and refuge; now, he calmly but forcefully thumps the ground—to shake it a bit, yes, but also to know if it is now firm below his feet. Neither a lament for the loss of a homeland in the East nor an ode to the attainment of safe havens in the West, these poems are sign posts marking the persistent intersections of race, colonization, culture, and art in the experiential realms of human consciousness and emotion.”

—Fauzia Rafique, author of Skeena, The Adventures of SahebaN, and, co-founder of Surrey Muse