“As a practicing Muslim, I found myself nodding as I read Fasting for Ramadan: Notes From a Spiritual Practice, particularly at Kazim Ali’s descriptions of the feeling one gets when going without food or drink. Like this: ‘One feels, at the end of a day of fasting, like a tree branch or a bone bleached in the sun.’ Reading these essays is about as close as you can get (short of doing it yourself) to experiencing the monthlong daylight fast that millions of Muslims worldwide keep each year. He paints a rare and intimate portrait of the faster’s mind-set.”
—Allie Shah, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The mix of quotidian detail and the extraordinarily rich vocabulary Ali has cultivated through the discipline of inwardness for raising subverbal impression to the level of speech locates the reader both in and outside of the fasts. We encounter observations on Islamic texts and practices alongside breakfast menus …, etymological musings …, accounts of yoga practice …, lines from Dickinson, Rumi, the Indigo Girls, and the Bhagavad Gita, ruminations on hunger, and scenes from The Matrix. All of these serve as spiritual resources, as does the love of his parents the poet is rediscovering, as does the mystery of the relationship between body and spirit…”
—Lee Sharkey, The Beloit Poetry Journal