Ramji, Shazia Hafiz: Port of Being

Port of Being by Shazia Hafiz Ramji (Invisible Publishing, paperback)

Publication Date: October 15, 2018

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Winner of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Voyeurism and fact go head to head in PORT OF BEING, a debut poetry collection that mines speech from the city streets and the Internet. These are poems set firmly on the threshold of the private and public, the future-haunted and the real, forging the human adrift in a terrain of space junk, drones, and addiction. PORT OF BEING speaks just in time, navigating the worlds of surveillance, migration, and money, only to carve a way into intimacy and connection.

"Shazia Hafiz Ramji writes with an intimacy that echoes the unspoken familiar across the ocean to map us—to 'root and hold' us—right now, right here where we live. PORT OF BEING is a collection of keen listening, where words are found, spliced, and always woven with sunshine, pain, and memory that shimmers."—Juliane Okot Bitek

"PORT OF BEING by Shazia Hafiz Ramji, is a revelation: one that reveals the surface beneath the surface, and the uncertain in the overdetermined. If the city is a machine of social sublimation, then these poems are the glint of its gears. Ramji demonstrates with devastating energy how form is infrastructure. You could drown in the static of our times, or you could traverse it like an ocean. PORT OF BEING is an ingenious manual, in verse, for how to do the latter."—Wayde Compton