Raena Shirali

“These poems seethe with the energies of violence endured and absorbed—where can it go? Raena Shirali locates the pain, the weapons, and the tools needed to cleanse and dress wounds. I am in awe of this book: the shimmering images and the worlds they conjure, the insight that knocks them down, the escapes from collapse at a poem’s end, the renewal marked by each new beginning. summonings is remarkable and will be with me forever.”

-Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic and My Body Is a Book of Rules

praise for summonings

“ ‘Who owns / this world’? Raena Shirali has written a precise sensory archive of the rejection of wisdom and the rejection of feeling, and this act of mourning drives her verse into the very magical acts its women are persecuted for— and I should warn you that as such it is very, very beautiful. We seem to fear beauty, at least lately, on this planet. Shirali’s poetics find that beyond the historicization and theory of witchcraft, from one culture into the next, and beyond the fundamental dignity of bearing witness, there is something uncanny, even supernatural, that becomes achievable by approaching the truth— the facts— somehow femininely. These poems feel impelled by Justice but are not merely pious: they are sensuous, precise, they move me to face my own wounds, move me closer to life, they draw the living and the dead, the crime and the punishment, the seduction and its consequences into a space through which I seem to see, glimmering, beckoning—another, a truer, way to be. A marvelous and important book.”

-Ariana Reines, author of A Sand Book

“To immerse yourself in the world built through the work in summonings is to also welcome a reckoning, to walk out of the book with a series of questions about what stories get told, why they get told, and who they serve. Not only are the poems sharply and eloquently crafted, there’s a depth and wealth of research woven into that craft, making this a book of immense generosity.”

– Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

Reviews of summonings

Muzzle Magazine
Washington Independent Review of Books
Savvy Verse & Wit
Goodreads

praise for GILT

"To read GILT is to open windows steamed with bright and exacting language, worlds where a “cobra is a garland—no, the cobra / is a man’s knuckles, a girl’s hair clumped / between them…” Shirali’s tough-tender debut embroiders lavish Indian weddings and Diwali festivals with the reckonings of a relationship’s end. The rich wisdom you glean from the powerful pages of GILT will leave you spent and enchanted."
-Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders

"Raena Shirali is a poet who keeps asking what poems can actually do, and these formally inventive lyrics ask for activity, for travel.  Her comment on culture, on identity, on justice is her comment on poetry.  It is not fixed; and if it is, it shouldn’t be. GILT is a book of danger and sarcasm
and heart."
-Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

reviews of GILT
Chicago Review of Books
The Yale Review
The Best American Poetry
Jacket2
Empty Mirror