Coining a Wishing Tower is a meditation on death and the afterlife—and the irresistible pull between the two.
“In the end, living is dying many times in one singular life,” writes Ayesha Raees, inviting you to consider the departures that make up one lifetime. The splintering of a voice from domestic life, the defiance of wisdom leaving childhood behind, the egress from one’s country of birth, and the non-permanence of life and inanimate objects become the rich pasture for the hybrid epic poems in this collection.
Through investigation of family, faith, empire, and desire, Raees sutures together parables, both real and imagined, as concrete prose-poems of chronicle and whimsy. Imagination here is populated by House Mouse running towards “the end of all possible height,” Godfish swimming in “an aquarium sea,” oblivious to the moon’s infatuation, and a cat, helplessly in love with Godfish. Nestled among them is the speaker: a daughter who desires to leave, an alien who wishes to hang herself on a wound in New York City, a philosopher who coos, “The bare minimum to life… is to just live.”
With precise instincts and the sweeping ambition of a fable-maker, a bright new voice marks her debut in American poetry.
“Everything I hope to find when I read a book of poetry—fearless reckoning with unprecedented experience spoken in a singular, deeply and importantly strange lyric voice,” said poet Kaveh Akbar choosing the collection as the winner of the 2020 Broken River Book Prize.
