Saba Syed Razvi (Poetry) | Victoria, TX

Saba Syed Razvi is the author of In the Crocodile Gardens (Agape Editions), Of the Divining and the Dead (Finishing Line Press), and the forthcoming Beside the Muezzin’s Call & Beyond the Harem’s Veil (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Offending Adam, Diner, TheTHE Poetry Blog’s Infoxicated Corner, The Homestead Review, NonBinary Review, 10×3 plus, 13th Warrior Review, The Arbor Vitae Review, and Arsenic Lobster, among others, as well as in anthologies such as Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War Faith and Sexuality, The Loudest Voice Anthology, The Liddell Book of Poetry, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity. Her poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Award, the Rhysling Award, and have won a 2015 Independent Best American Poetry Award. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Victoria, TX, where in addition to working on scholarly research on interfaces between Science and contemporary Poetry, she is studying Sufi Poetry in translation, and writing new poems and fiction. She is available for readings, roundtables on craft, guest lectures in classes, meetings with book-clubs, and microworkshops; if she can’t manage the travel in a particular case, she is available through online video-calls.

Books

Chapbooks

Press & Reviews

About In the Crocodile Gardens:
“Infused with an taste of the mythical and infiltrated by tendrils of literary allusion, this elegant collection feels beyond time—and yet it also faces contemporary challenges with uncommon delicacy and insight. And whether it’s treating the war in Afghanistan or the goddess Persephone, each poem conveys an intimacy, a proximity: Razvi’s voice is very, very close to her reader, almost whispering these vibrant images and compelling, highly crafted phrases.”
–Cole Swensen, author of The Glass Age, editor of American Hybrid

“Unabashedly passionate in her sharp imagery, her tone, and her vision, Saba Syed Razvi’s poems will have you journey in the realms of crocodile, bulldozer, and the body’s contours. Enjoy!”
–Kimiko Hahn, author of Toxic Flora & Brain Fever

“In her first collection Saba Syed Razvi haunts a spiritual lyricism with ravenous, often predatory language. These poems read like Rumi wrestling a crocodile.”
–Roger Sedarat, author of Ghazal Games & Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic

About Of the Divining and the Dead
“The title of Saba Syed Razvi’s Of the Divining and the Dead, draws us into the world of the daemon and the darkness, the reach of the “Bitter Tree”, reminiscent of Plath’s terrifying yew tree, rooted in oblivion. We see through the “peacock’s moon-skilled eye” and learn, with the poet, “the speech running under my skin”. This is a book filled with night-terrors, but lit by the powerful protective beams of this extraordinary poet’s dazzling imagination.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Twin Cities & Sparrow, former poet laureate of CA.

“Saba Syed Razvi’s poems are both lithe and electric, and the compelling imagination behind this work is capable of being both capacious in its perspective yet relentless in its investigations of experience. This chapbook is riveting from beginning to end.”
—David St. John, author of The Red Leaves of Night and The Face

This collection is a lyric tour-de-force, with its pliant sonic imagination, finely knotting sensory and visceral illuminations with the otherworldly; the poet is an acrobat, steady yet tenuously balanced, on the edge of a world, delivered like a pearl, from the clutch of the inarticulate. Long after we have read them, these poems, their uncanny landscapes and acts of shadowy divination, will haunt, undoing and remaking us.
—Susan McCabe, author of Swirl and Descartes’ Nightmare.

Saba Razvi’s Of the Divining and the Dead is timeless, sensual, and spiritually charged. Razvi’s words make haunting and riveting images come alive.
—Leah Maines, author of Beyond the River.

Love what we do? Take a second to support us on Patreon!