Review: Doyali Islam

Reviews and Praise for HEFT (M&S, 2019):

“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.” — 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize Jury

“Formally innovative and emotionally resonant, these striking poems use their bifurcated structure to map a vast and varied terrain. Though each poem is split from itself, the “contrast in [them] swells to friction” through Islam’s ambitious use of structure and lyric. Deftly stitching together a range of subjects, from diasporic experience to the experience of chronic illness, these poems are a master class in contrast and overlap; a study not just of how the body lives in the world, but how the world lives in the body.” — 2020 Trillium Book Award for Poetry Jury

“In her sophomore collection heft, Doyali Islam unfolds multitude possibilities from poetic form. Through her split sonnets, double sonnets and parallel poems, Islam creates a delicate tension between histories and geographies. The author’s attention to language — sonorous, limpid, and precise — is mirrored by her care for the surprising moments both outside her and within. By turns personal and political, her poems feel as though they could be folded over onto themselves, their sometimes divergent experiences finding touching proximity. Through her poems, our lives gather intimacy across a world’s vastness.” — 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Jury

“And, of course, there is the question of tenderness in relation to beauty and intent. […] 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. So, I would say that the beauty in heft is both structural and also in its tenderness. Tenderness, empathy, is a longing, an ache, and heft is beautiful with it.” — Anne Michaels (CV2 Magazine)

“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


Praise for YUSUF AND THE LOTUS FLOWER (BuschekBooks, 2011):

“The debut of an extraordinary poet.” – Sylvia Legris