Madiha Arsalan

One poet I immediately noticed was Madiha Arsalan. Arsalan's poem "Dhol" here [scroll down] in The Labletter is just excellent. Arsalan has an excellent slow build to beautiful truths that aren't some final toss-away line.

Arsalan has work that is very Indian/Pakistani in feel and it's got a great feel of almost twenties style abandon, of the bright moments [that Walter Pater would have approved of, with his emphasis on bright, ecstatic moments, almost like Joyce's interest in epiphanies] before the crash. There's another poem here in The Missing Slate, called "Decaf Immigrant".

I loved the lines, from "Dhol": 

[...] That was the summer he taught me

joy

is learning how to sleep under
a shimmering patchwork comforter
of sky. [...]

Arsalan was also in Linden Avenue Literary Journal issue three, here with her poem "Tamarind", which is just excellent, complex and beautiful. I immediately thought of the ancient beauty of verse like the Song of Solomon:

[...] and I kneel

 

down further to take you in deeper

 

with my serpentine hair wrapped around your olive branch
arm.

 

Your every thrust is tart tamarind,

 

each sinful slap of skin electric pucker,

 

as my frenzied cries drown out the call to prayer,

 

and a molten surge [...]