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description: City of Rivers has been nominated for a 2013 Northern California Book Award in Poetry.Poets &amp; Writers Magazine has named Ahmed as one of the top debut poets of 2012. Zubair Ahmeds first poetry collection City of Rivers captures the readers heart from its first line to its last. These poems are reminders of poetrys power to leave us breathless after immersing us in truths both wonderful and painful. - ZYZZYVA...his poems are brief and beautiful with final lines (The light source is somewhere beyond / The years of my life.) that should be scratched onto padlocks locked to the Pont des Arts over the Seine.... City of Rivers is a treasure you would do well to read. - ArtvoiceWhile I imagine one of the reasons readers might find themselves interested in City of Rivers will be due to Ahmeds relatively young age such readers will invariably find themselves more interested in exploring the range of his vision and the confidence he seems to have hammered into every one of his sharp stoic lines.... Ahmed possesses a profound understanding of the nature all poets young and old sharehe recognizes that the words are a dream that they haunt the body and their constant buzzing their inability to give us solace keep us moving. - The RumpusHonestly Ive not yet read a contemporary poet of his equal. - Chico News Review...a startling first collection of poems... - Shelf-AwarenessThis unusually compact and consistent debut from an unusually young poet might get noticed first for that poets unusual migratory life... Such work looks back productively to the American Deep Image style of the 1960s to James Wright and the young Robert Bly. - Publisher's WeeklyAny poet would hope for the kind of praise that glows from the back cover of Zubair Ahmeds debut poetry collection City of Rivers. Bracingly originalushered into being by a prodigious new voice in America poetry. Add to that the fact that Ahmed is only twenty-five that his first book was published by McSweeneys and you have a rising star certainly worth keeping an eye on. Becausehigh as the book jacket praise might beAhmed lives up to it. - Late Night LibraryWe used to play soccer in the monsoon rains.Through my windows I can see acres of fieldsLying in the ruins of the wind.The poems in City of Riversthe first full-length collection from 23-year-old wunderkind Zubair Ahmedare clear and cool as a glass of water. Grounded in his childhood in Bangladesh Ahmeds spare evocative poems cast a knowing eye on the wider world telling us what its like to be displaced and replaced relocated and dislocated. His poems are suffused with a graceful mysterious pathosand also with joy humor and longingwith the full range of human emotions. City of Rivers is a remarkable and precocious debut.
language: English
title: City of Rivers
publisher: McSweeney's