NEWest RELEASE
Bark Archipelago
"Combining the lush sensibility of the Urdu ghazal with the cosmopolitan epigrammatic crack of modern Indian English, Sophia Naz has written a masterful book."
Kazim Ali, author of Sukun, New and Selected Poems
Sophia Naz’s Bark Archipelago hits startling and giddy, inventive and destroyful. Sinewy lines of chime and pun, misdirection and feint make to paint grotesques. This is a remarkable book of material, a broadside of extracted flesh and stone. Things. And the people who are made them again and again.
Douglas Kearney, author of Sho
These mercurial poems—Sphinx-like, “s/addled” with the responsibility of a world in delirium—call in linkages and playful techniques that “rite, ignite” their way into renewal. Something “rubs” free in the space between languages and moves past the amnion to drop into an “unborn sea.” Pay attention.
Monica Mody, author of Kala Pani
Poetry Books
Open zero
These new poems by Sophia Naz are marked by a deep music, the strong beating of a battered but indomitable heart, the percussion of a tidal bore of meticulously crafted emotion. This is an apostrophe to loss, marked by the optimism inherent in poetry, for Naz’s passion for language goes way deeper than the anagrams and play of post-modernism, drawing the reader into a new territory of passionate rediscovery and retrieval.
Jerry Pinto
PUBLISHED
THE UNTOLD STORY
Shehnaz was a beautiful, erudite woman from the royal family of Bhopal, who was almost cast to play Anarkali in K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam. Her daughter Sophia Naz tells her story as she heard it from her - Shehnaz’s childhood as part of the royal household in Bhopal, where she led a revolt among the women for their right to be educated before being married, her glamorous life in Mumbai that hid the reality of an abusive first marriage that left her emotionally and physically traumatized, her divorce during which she lost custody of both her children to her husband, her second marriage to an army doctor in Pakistan, and her life thereafter.
Writing Samples
Peripheries | “habeas corpus”
Produce the body, her delicate coinage laid out as dowry would be, for all to examine
Richness of loss, touch her mongrel flair
curve of missing column, absent shair
Join the discussion
ModPo Minute Discussion of “Habeaus Corpus” with Professor Al Filreis & Douglas Kearney
A Review of Peripheries by Ger Killeen
buy my books
shop
speaking engagements
“Sophia Naz traces the birthing and dying of languages, their continual borrowings, the sameness in their myriad differences.”
