A Queen of No Ordinary Realms

In his first book, Naveed Alam has managed a dangerously strange journey into the dream lives of the condemned, the oppressed, the prodigal, and the lost. With remarkable clarity he shows us the father whose tears flood the street, the prostitute for whom every customer is Jesus, the angels of desolation who tear off their own wings. In its exotic violence and beauty, its surreal narrative and unwavering honesty, this collection brings something new to our poetry: a clear view of dispossession coupled with the terrors and wonders of the inner life.

Naveed Alam

Naveed Alam was born and raised in Pakistan. He received a BA in history from Macalester College and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon. He lives in Spanish Harlem and teaches English and creative writing at the City University of New York.

Reviews

Naveed Alam's realms emerge from ancient, courtly poetic traditions of the Middle East to speak for the transnational twenty-first century. The personae of the poems move through a global marginalized world that stretches from the Silk Road to cyberspace, from the seraglios of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights to the slums of the Developing World. The poet's uncanny ability to mythologize the everyday mysteries of human relationships transforms these poems into a haunting Book of Journeys in which safari is the steady state and wandering is a permanent address.

—Carolyne Wright

A Queen of No Ordinary Realms expresses not just the imagination of exile, which is always exotic and provocative, but it champions the exiled imagination that must create its own world to survive. When every facet of experience and emotion becomes estranged, Alam knows that only imagination can energize "The immense barren syllables" of language . . .

—Walter Bargen, author of The Feast and The Body of Water

Ordering Information

To purchase A Queen of No Ordinary Realms by Naveed Alam, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available online at UPNE, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.