The Man in 119

Kazim Ali’s latest collection uses a migrant geography to explore how the self moves through grief.

The Man in 119, the latest collection from accomplished poet Kazim Ali, explores loss and grief, alongside the human body and the natural world. Here, the tongue becomes a collaboration between human and glacial current, the human body—a “tectonic topography of god.” Grappling with his mother’s death, alongside philosophical questions of immortality, Ali asks what we become when we leave this world: “earth or sky or memory only”? With musicality and minimal punctuation, these poems offer vignettes of various geographies, individuals, and memories. We learn that like migration, the body moves, it reproduces itself through the experience of losing and living still.