summonings

<h2>ABOUT</h2><p><br></p><p>Indebted to the docupoetics tradition Raena Shirali's <em style=color: inherit>summonings</em> investigates the ongoing practice of witch (daayan) hunting in India. Here poems interrogate the political implications & shortcomings of writing Subaltern personae while acknowledging the author's Westernized positionality. Continuing to explore multi-national and intersectional concerns around identity raised in her debut collection Shirali asks how first- & second-generation immigrants reconcile the self with the lineages that shape it wondering aloud about those lineages' relationships to misogyny & violence. These precarious poems explore how antiquated & existing norms surrounding female mysticism in India & America inform each culture's treatment of women. As Jericho Brown wrote of Shirali's poetics in <em style=color: inherit>GILT</em> her comment on culture on identity on justice is her comment on poetry. <em style=color: inherit>summonings</em> is comment on power & patriarchy on authorial privilege & the shifting role of witness & ultimately on an ethical poetics grounded in the inevitable failure to embody the Other.</p><p><br></p><h2>PRAISE</h2><p><br></p><p>These poems seethe with the energies of violence endured and absorbed-where can it go? Raena Shirali locates the pain the weapons and the tools needed to cleanse and dress wounds. I am in awe of this book: the shimmering images and the worlds they conjure the insight that knocks them down the escapes from collapse at a poem's end the renewal marked by each new beginning. <em style=color: inherit>summonings</em> is remarkable and will be with me forever.</p><p>-Elissa Washuta author of <em style=color: inherit>White Magic</em> and <em style=color: inherit>My Body Is a Book of Rules</em></p><p><br></p><p>To immerse yourself in the world built through the work in <em style=color: inherit>summonings</em> is to also welcome a reckoning to walk out of the book with a series of questions about what stories get told why they get told and who they serve. Not only are the poems sharply and eloquently crafted there's a depth and wealth of research woven into that craft making this a book of immense generosity.</p><p>- Hanif Abdurraqib author of <em style=color: inherit>A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance</em> and <em style=color: inherit>A Fortune for Your Disaster</em></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>