Sketch 19
by Nuar Alsadir
A woman in high heels walks slowly along the broken avenue.
The boys tangle their leashes trying to get ahead, turn and
look back at her, then veer up the hill towards the open
field. The park can’t contain their desire. It pours into the
atmosphere in particles that speed and collide, cause small
children to lose their balance and fall off their bikes. This is
quantum entanglement on an unseasonably warm November
afternoon, the smell of coffee from Bittersweet that makes me
bend backwards into morning, the spring of another year, trip
while rushing home to meet you–
From Fourth Person Singular. Reproduced with kind permission of Pavilion Poetry
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2017
Fourth Person Singular
Nuar Alsadir
About Nuar Alsadir
Nuar Alsadir (b. New Haven, Connecticut) works as a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst and academic in New York. ‘The mind doesn’t see images, hear, smell, perceive in tidy succession,’ she says. ‘That cacophonous chaos, which visual arts often capture so vividly, is exciting to me.’
Alsadir, born of Iraqi parents, responded strongly to the coverage of the Iraqi war. ‘I began to realize the extent to which the chaos of the external world — and my internal world — demanded accurate expression. More than ever, the ready-made forms did not feel relevant to me or able to truthfully hold what the world — or I — had become.’ Fourth Person Singular is a deeply politically engaged book, which dares readers into new ways of ordering their thoughts and the information around them.
Her favourite reading is ‘poetry, aphorisms, philosophy, theory — texts that I can read very little of and then think about, off page, for hours.’
