Description
Bark Archipelago represents both a seafaring vessel and the skin of language in which the body is held. These ruptures render each poem an island separated from, yet connected to, a larger whole. Naz’s canvas is at once epic and intimate, her ability to telescope and juxtapose history with lived experience a remarkable feat.
Sophia Naz’s Bark Archipelago hits startling and giddy, inventive and destroyful. Sinewy lines of chime and pun, misdirection and feint, make to paint grotesques. Excess tangled in loss, thus “everything will kill you,” even a lawn, even a length of fabric, even marriage. Naz pans slowly over the gory flensing of a whale and later breaks a human body into six members under twilight as gelatinous as blubber. This is a book of material, a broadside of extracted flesh and stone. Things. And the people who are made them. Material: the poet’s language itself should fill your mouth before you spill it into air like “windborne plastic bags”; till the thought-bubbles come, “taking up all the oxygen.” Yes: Bark Archipelago is breathless, racing to the line break before autocorrect can aggress or we wheel and deal the globe to our end. — Douglas Kearney, author of Sho
These poems spin and spark, their language so playful and musical, filled with the energy of sound and motion. Combining the lush sensibility of the Urdu ghazal with the cosmopolitan epigrammatic crack of modern Indian English, Sophia Naz has written a masterful book. — Kazim Ali, author of Sukun: New and Selected Poems
These mercurial poems — Sphinx-like, “s/addled” with the responsibility of a world in delirium — call in linkages and playful techniques that “rite, ignite” their way into renewal. Something “rubs” free in the space between languages and moves past the amnion to drop into an “unborn sea.” Pay attention. — Monica Mody, author of Kala Pani
Sophia Naz is a bilingual poet, artist, author, editor and translator. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize; in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry. Her work features in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets, The Night Heron Barks, Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry Under Lockdown, Berfrois, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Rattle, The Punch Magazine, Poetry At Sangam, Poetry International Rotterdam, The Adirondack Review, The Wire, Chicago Quarterly Review, Blaze Vox, Scroll, The Daily O, Cafe Dissensus, RAIOT, Ideas And Futures, Chapati Mystery, Guftugu, Pratik, Gallerie International, Coldnoon, VAYAVYA, The Bangalore Review, Papercuts, Madras Courier, The Yearbook of Indian Poetry and many others. She has authored the poetry collections — Peripheries (Cyberhex 2015), Pointillism (Copper Coin 2017) Date Palms (City Press 2017) Open Zero (Yoda Press 2021), and Shehnaz, a biography (Penguin Random House 2019). Bark Archipelago is her fifth collection of poetry.
She can be found online at www.sophianaz.com
