Description
Two brothers wrestle, a bird lies in a young boy’s hand, an entire field lives within the eye of a needle.
Noon is a sparkling debut from Birmingham-born poet Zain Rishi, exploring home, family and faith.
From the heat of the school relay and his grandmother’s Kashmiri chai to the images of a young man kissing a city goodbye, these poems chart a coming-of-age journey across place, sexuality and family ties.
Rich in its interrogation of language and inheritance across generations, Noon announces Zain Rishi as one of the UK’s most exciting new voices.
Praise for Noon
“The poems in Noon are precise, elegant, surprising and romantic. Tracing an arc across heritages, through language and the spark of human touch, they reach up towards a zenith, a heaven just beyond knowing but nevertheless palpable in the tenderness of these poems. Full of rich imagery and formal intuition, Noon is a bright balm of a book.” ~ Seán Hewitt
“In Noon, Zain Rishi deftly explores the loves, histories and griefs held together on the tongue and in the body. Lyrical and precise, these poems explore how it is possible to hold memory as a physical weight, and how we carry it with us across cities and continents, through silence and across lost tongues. There is grief here, but stitched together with that longing is a poetry that feels vibrantly alive, as words slip into sound and reform as something new. I have been waiting for a pamphlet as beautiful and as aching as this one.” ~ Hannah Copley, author of LapwingÂ
“In language both exacting and exultant, Rishi always bends towards tenderness. There is a richness here, too—a precise sensory attunement both to the natural world and to the everyday rhythms of family, religion, and culture. These are poems with much to savour; Noon is a garden.” ~ Gustav Parker Hibbett
“Suffused with longing and light, Zain Rishi’s Noon is a vivid ode to multilingualism, faith and belonging in “this country of skin”. Through forms ranging from the lyric to prose poems, Rishi deftly explores the complexity of a queer self that is perpetually “beginning still”. This luminous pamphlet offers an evocative glimpse of a life bridged between geographies and selves, “flung like a baton into the hard light of noon”” ~ Mary Jean Chan
“Dazzling, tender, unexpected, these poems tell an affecting story of a young queer man moving between worlds. Zain Rishi’s love of language shines through Noon as he reveals all the things that make us who we are. An original and exciting new voice in the poetry world! Hip hip!” ~ Jackie Kay
“I felt a curious sense of homecoming reading the poems in Zain Rishi’s Noon. What a wonder it is to encounter a voice like this, filled with such tenderness and longing. If noon is the time of greatest clarity and light, then here—Rishi seems to be saying—see how the past lives alongside the future; see how our many countries, languages, selves, make space for one another on the page, extend a hand between blackberry brambles and saag fields. This is poetry as utterance, as praise, as breath that holds everything together.” ~ Tishani Doshi, author of A God at the Door
