Raena Shirali

Biography

Raena Shirali is the author of GILT (YesYes, 2017), which won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book award. She was the 2017 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. Shirali’s poems and reviews have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Nation, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of Muzzle magazine and an assistant professor of English at Holy Family University.

See Work

POETRY / Fall 2020

garba, or womb + lamp, or as in every tradition there is a woman & her body & both are vessels

By Raena Shirali

                    toenail polish warped waxen from sand, you leave 
          your body behind again—mere rind, edges buzzing
from unsought touch. you end up in a skeleton

POETRY / Fall 2020

summoning : ash in my palms, ash on the streets

By Raena Shirali

reeking of moss & blossom & on the street
i call home, i cannot be sure if i
exist. my thighs press on one another

POETRY / Fall 2020

summoning with chai & failure

By Raena Shirali

in the living room again, i cannot conjure
even the space i inhabit. rain for several

POETRY / Fall 2020

the village men find some [fellowship], [hunt]

By Raena Shirali

system says we’re not in charge of much else
but this. system’s [planter’s raj] & the damn 
tea. the Brits sell us, Lipton sells us, Tata 
sells us. when are we permitted to unload? 

POETRY / Fall 2020

the universe will end & kali will still be here,

By Raena Shirali

solo, skirting the rim of our smolder, our ruin,

all lotus bud, bell-beat & drum-song, those many hands &
the severed heads they hold, masc-demonic,