All the Stars Aflame

In All the Stars Aflame, Malik Abduh journeys to various places in our history - shapeshifting, listening, bearing witness, and returning to the present to offer us impressions, portraits, the local evidence of rage and love. This debut collection is more than a decade in the making from a poet who composes with impressive scholarly attention, while remaining delighted in language and scene-making. Abduh's craft is spiritually attuned to a feverish love of justice. He points us to the patterns of the past which make a kind of music, so that all the fragments of these stories make a song-and that song burns with American history. I'm thrilled to finally see these poems in the world. - Patrick Rosal