"We pray best by opening ourselves like a book."

An essay replaces itself as the body does between nourishment – in rest and fitfulness, with the surety of a finite goal along an infinite plane. It is a regular feat Kazim Ali documents in Fasting for Ramadan, performed by Muslims who restrict their digestive intake of food or water from dawn to sunset for the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar, or approximately 29.5 days. But if the numbers who undertake to express their faith and social connections through fasting make the practice common, a reflection of the process from an accomplished poet makes this treasure rare.

In Arabic, fasting, “Siyam” or “Saun,” means “to be at rest.” One rests the system from the travails of digestion in order to tune into another frequency, quieter perhaps if only in the subtle constancy that what abides does so without fanfare. A religious practice must provide a means for equilibrium—the two limbs that form a trunk being the secular and the spiritual. “What if,” Ali asks, “the ability to maintain that balance is the entire point?”

But there is no “point” to fasting, he follows, nothing so easy or static as a conclusion—only the talent one practices for holding the bowl of one’s note during the drum roll of daily life. To watch milk bead in a blade of grass after someone complains about the price of gas is to live with an attentive eye scanning Indra’s net of eyes—ocular, electric, and extrasensory. Those who feel an expectation to hone it appreciate a poet’s vision.

Fasting for Ramadan is divided into two journals and a Coda. The first section, “New Moon in the Western Sky: Ramadan Essays” was initially posted in the form of blog notes on Kenyon Review Online. The essays follow a chronological accounting of Ali’s shifting awareness, which ranges from the recognition of “how small and tender the ego is” to an observation of the demands of eating, which fatigues the body even as it refuels it. Breaking the fast each evening serves as a reminder that the fast is intended to end, Ali says, “Which means even if you come to a realization about the illusions and temporality of the world, the fragility of the body, you are still supposed to come back to both." “The boredom and the horror,” Donald Justice says, the glory and the matter of ephemera.

Ali confesses to being an awkward yogi, humbled by the limitations of his body, which parallels his devotion to language even as it restricts him. “Truth should be wordless,” he says on Day Eight. Poets are notorious for lamenting ineffability, but it bodes well for his pursuit of the lyric. The stronger a poet gets, the more intimately he recognizes the bonds of its proviso. The yearning throughout these meditations recalls Emily Dickinson’s “Who never wanted—maddest joy,” which is a two quatrain poem on the nature of desire. Ali asks himself why he is reaching infinitely outward. Dickinson says to grasp is “Desire’s perfect goal.” As if in return, Ali asks: “What happens after I cease failing?." One leans and slips, steps and misses the self that is nowhere else and still.

In this way, Fasting limns the writing process. Laced with fringe benefits for Ali readers, it includes side notes about Bright Felon and books of influence, but it is more often illustrative of the negotiation between privacy and connection in writing—especially as Ali drafted it for an Internet public that includes his mother, with whom he says he is in love. In spite of its overt exposure, he says, it “feels like secret writing." Many artists reckon repeatedly with those conversations in which one party is silent. Ali confesses to having worried “all along” about being alone. Seldom is the reward rightly anticipated, and aloneness is a freeing illusion to be free of, coming as it does in the midst of what could have been a self-isolating quest after the sacred. Communion radiates on all levels.

Ali lays his prose stone by glittering stone—one sentence at a time, he writes, not knowing where each line will take him. Writing parallels fasting in the sense that “you are meant to feel under duress. A controlled situation." The best writing is discomfiting, an ongoing oust of familiar knowledge at each point of which the unknown presents itself. To subject oneself to examination is to ensure that there is one. It would almost be a reclamation of the power by the examiner were it not dedicated to the God that issues the ability to examine. To volunteer suffering when one is a creature empowered only to resist it, is perhaps the most generous gesture possible.

Acknowledging the dynamic between “art and artifice,” Ali says: “I like a constructed art....Though I also love art completely unthought and spontaneous." Every writer is an experiment, performer or scientist, undertaking “to be a student again." One fasts for freshness, to reset the appetite, to whet it. Every day of the fast teaches him something different, let alone each Ramadan. For the two festivals here recorded he undertakes to be a traveler in a newly foreign country, receptive enough to re-letter the age-old dawn finger by rosy finger. It is a kind of jockeying—a wangle or swap to net satiety. “I had been hungry, all the Years,” Emily Dickinson says. “To break the truth is to tell it,” Ali says, toeing that high-wire between disclosure and bewilderment. “Lord, increase my bewilderment,” Fanny Howe says, citing a Muslim prayer.¹ Such poets and pray-ers are made of sturdy stuff, to welcome upheaval and go into it.

The second section, “Absence of Stars: A Fasting Notebook” is a private journal Ali kept for himself several years prior to the Ramadan observance that opens the text. He pairs the two experiences metaphorically by the pilgrimage to the mosque on Eid-ul-Fitr, the celebration at the end of the fast, when one travels toward the concluding prayers by a different route than the one leading home. “Absence” is more intermittent, allowing of white space through which the mind wanders. He dedicates it to his mother, with whom he first shared the intimacy of fasting—a contrary closeness borne of unbridgeable distance: