This groundbreaking, transgenre work-part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past-is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http://brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

Ali, journeying backwards through autobiography, writes an elegy for lost love and unrequited faith another kind of exile. Lori Tsang, MultiCultural Review
The pleasure of reading Bright Felon derives in large part from its invitation to us to give ourselves over to the music of language. Lee Sharkey, Beloit Poetry Journal
The speed and energy of this language, and its confident movement, are undeniable and compelling .There is a lovely plenitude in the embroidery woven out of these journeys, inner and outer the rich and nuanced tracings of contemporary experience Ali offers here are reward enough. Jeff Gundy, The Georgia Review
Bright Felon is a troubling work of unrelieved sadness and relentless self-examination and yet, for all that, it is also a monument to a yearning for oblivion, a desire so unimpeachable at its center it reminds us that there are no happy endings only intervals of relief. Tyrone Williams, The Volta

KAZIM ALI is a poet, essayist, novelist, and translator.