“Reading these poems put me in the immediate mind of reading Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge — these poems spin and spark, their language so playful and musical, filled with the energy of sound and motion. Lalla meets Eunice de Souza? An appropriate comparison. 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. Excess tangled in loss, thus ‘everything will kill you,’ even a lawn, even a length of fabric, even marriage. Naz pans slowly over the gory flensing of a whale and later breaks a human body into six members under twilight as gelatinous as blubber. This is a book of material, a broadside of extracted flesh and stone. Things. And the people who are made them. Material: the poet’s language itself should fill your mouth before you spill it into air like ‘windborne plastic bags’; till the thought-bubbles come, ‘taking up all the oxygen.’ Yes: Bark Archipelago is breathless, racing to the line break before autocorrect can aggress or we wheel and deal the globe to our end.”
—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