From a place where trees still speak to each other outside the prison cell, where gardens are manacled, where poems soar from a myth of desire to “the whiff of a car bomb,” these poems sing. They sing to us of exile from motherland, mother tongue, and mother, sing in the tradition of Vallejo and Lorca, of split identity, erotic impalement, and a reality that can only be rendered by surrealism. These are poems written from the boundless in-between, between “the excruciation of now and the myths,” “between two lines of the same poem written in the time of the Romanovs,” between history and hallucination. This is a book written from unquenchable longing with a full awareness of the lateness of the hour “as the world folds over like a paper plane.” They are the poems my soul needs.
—Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
In these brilliantly edgy poems, a cluster bomb and a scalpel in the hand of a doctor cutting into a skull both live next door to beauty’s ‘flutter of red phoenixes.’ They exist alongside the ‘bloody flowerbeds’ of Eros. They reside inside language that lies like a ‘brontosaurus wincing in his fossil grave.’ The entire world is here, and it’s our world. And, yes, it is a ravished world, but there is a note of defiance in these poems that breathes hope back into the core of it. Behind each poem there is a voice that keeps telling us to trust in the fact that even if the world seems to be irrevocably broken, poetry allows the ‘rampant mouth’ to make something amazing from it.
—Mary Jo Bang, author of Elegy and The Last Two Seconds
Brilliantly inventive and nearly selfless, The Minister of Disturbances braids the “khaki streets” of occupied cities with “all the nightingales in Persia” in these prismatic poems, “glances of blond daisies” mingling with the “whoosh of a cruise missile.” Urgency weds timelessness in Zeeshan Khan Pathan’s visions, as he unearths ravishing beauties of daily life from the destruction of ancient places, as his extinction elegies reach his own beloveds. His voice is a ministering presence in these compassionate, radiant poems. An astonishing debut.
—Paula Bohince, author of The Children and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods
When a poet threatens to walk in my galaxy, I wait with expectation! Zeeshan Khan Pathan's The Minister of Disturbances is one of the truly great books of poetry today. Zeeshan has no fear of relaying the truth about the way we murder and love, sometimes in the same day.
—CA Conrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
Federico García Lorca is one of the tutelary spirits to this passionately lyrical and deeply probing book of disturbances and dispossessions, of longing, quest and exile, a lost mother tongue, “a cloudburst of woe,” a beauty reclaimed.
—Edward Hirsch, president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
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