BOOKS
Blue Exodus
"Prayer, refuge, inheritance, and loss beat in the heart of these poems. Things are not what they seem to be: even in paradise 'a baobab died / with roots inside the ground.' Indeed, these lines ask the reader to interrogate all things in new vocabularies of anguish, born from the inheritor of a war—still being fought in the muscle memory of the people who lived through it. [...] Reading this collection again and again, I come away with the specters of the living and passed, asking me what it means to live as a story lives, to write a life’s ghost into poem. Entreaties to the Divine remain unanswered and unfulfilled as people are sent off to wars or drown in seas trying to escape as the poet reminds us, 'What twirls / over your roof / is either a kite / or a missile.' [...] The speaker-as-witness-as-refugee claims a place to stand in their mourning and grief, where 'echoes are translated into qasida.' Like the speaker calls out to the blackbird, I find myself calling out to the poet, 'saa magni dear bird, / tell me a story."
—Rajiv Mohabir, judge of The 2022 Orison Poetry Prize
Soliloquy
"Hussain Ahmed’s Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile sings in prayer, remembrance, and embrace. These poems, of a survivor seeking to honor the lost, undo and remake language into a new apparatus with which to love and carry the dead. These poems are caretakers of memory, lush and in love with the world, even in war, even in grief. ‘The moon shines brightest during the curfew,’ Ahmed writes. ‘There are more birds in the sky during the war.’"
—Melissa Ginsburg, author of Dear Weather Ghost
Harp in a fire Place
"Hussain Ahmed’s language resonates with the precision and detail of an earnest artist. A fine blend of history, memory, and spirituality, poems in this volume wax heroic: approaching despair, distance and loss with the certitude of hope. The poet invokes nature in its fullness and precariousness as witness to survival—birds in flight, bodies and geographies out of the hold of old colonies, the ritual of music engraved on human skin. This is a majestic work of an important voice"
—Naza Amaeze Okoli, editor of African Writer Magazine
