ClockWork

“I / would arm you with eyes for an / alternative narrative,” writes Zaid Shlah, in a collection that fiercely questions historically fixed ideas about language and then uses that questioning to create something new: a fast-paced, atonal, baroque, spare voice intent on defeating expectations. In a mix of prose and poetry, theory and autobiography, via sonnet cycles, experimental stanzaic arrangements and spiky free-verse, ClockWork is intellectually raw and linguistically free. I’ve read nothing like it.” – Carmine Starnino

“An urgent meditation on tensions between the lyric and the avant-garde, and on the contemporary poet’s exile from tradition. ClockWork calls for a poetry beyond aesthetics and innovation, and for the return of the poet-critic.” – Carolyn Cooke

This is a work of extraordinary vision and desire. Only a real poet would engage the labyrinthine domains of language, their factories and control systems, to achieve a genuine critical consciousness that insists on resistance as well as kindness. Zaid Shlah is such a poet, and his hybrid, achingly searching ClockWork captures this on the dot. This is no punch-card book. His imagination guides him to the revolutionary spirit of Nock, Gould and Said among others. “I saw more in the eyes of the/ poet in exile than in all the weight/ of the sagacious man’s empire,” he tells us. Shlah’s necessity arms us with an alternative narrative. – Fady Joudah