“Ayesha Raees’s Coining a Wishing Tower
is everything I hope to find when I read a book of poetry—fearless reckoning with unprecedented experience spoken in a singular, deeply and importantly strange lyric voice. My luck, to get to help introduce it to you. Your luck, to get to read it for the first time.”
—Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
AWARDS
AND RECOGNITIONS
Winner of
Broken River Prize
2020
Nominated and Longlisted for
Best First Collection of Poetry in 2022
BY Forward Art Foundation
Featured in Forward Book of Poetry 2022
REVIEWS
AND PRESS
A “Language for Loss and Grief”: An Interview with Ayesha Raees
-Westwind, UCLA Journal of the Arts
Interview With Ayesha Raees
- Four Way Reviews
Book Review
-Harbor Review
Get in touch for publicity, event, and other queries: meher@radixmedia.org
“Ayesha Raees’s Coining a Wishing Tower is an exciting debut collection that traverses multiple dimensions and landscapes, both metaphorical and physical. By skillfully playing with the theme of real or not-real, Raees invites the reader to meditate on what constitutes ‘real’ in the first place. The poet explores multiple other themes that play off one another—longing, belonging, departure, arrival, life, death, prayer, performance, and love, to name a few—through recurring figures that reflect and refract one another’s desires. By rendering the figures’ thoughts and situations into prose poetry, Raees also formally illustrates the various enclosures that serve to both trap and liberate the figures. Smart and imaginative, Coining a Wishing Tower is one worth reading over and over for the rich imagery and storytelling; a book that offers a new discovery at each savoring.”
—Emily Yoon, Find Me as the Creature I Am
“Ayesha Raees’ Coining a Wishing Tower is a beautiful epic, told through prose poems that surprise with precise and wondrous language. Raees thinks through art, place, family, life, and the afterlife, animating the collection through various characters—House Mouse, Godfish, the moon—and mediating it all through a Pakistani, Muslim, and woman speaker, who traverses racialized and gendered spaces’ pilgrimages of faith and of the imagination; knowing and unknowing. In this debut, we find a bright and wild new voice in poetry.”
—Cathy Linh Che, Split
“With Coining a Wishing Tower, Ayesha Raees’ intercultural, interreligious meditation on family life, childhood, memory, and death, comes a bold imagination populated with a cat and a moon both in love with a Godfish, a House Mouse who performs rituals, where death is one such ritual, and a child who tells their father that ‘The bare minimum to life…is to just live.’ At its core, this collection wrestles with grief amidst life between cultures, religions, and geographic places. After hammering a nail into the sky, the speaker reveals, ‘I want to hang myself on its wound,’ and so too, was I rapt, hanging on the words of Raees’ fashioned wound.”
—Diana Khoi Nguyen, Root Fractures
“You are entering a world of Ayesha Raees’ making, a lyric fable woven in tight silk strands. Singular in its voice and imagination, Coining a Wishing Tower is unyielding in its search for truth, for a spiritual tether. Its allegories remind us of what’s holy in the everyday: a mother’s faith, a father’s machinery, a moon in love with a goldfish, the omniscience of Google. She writes, ‘On fifth avenue, I want to be important. I want to hammer a nail into the New York sky. I want to hang myself on its wound’ That’s Raees daring you to leave unchanged.”
—Ruth Awad, Outside the Joy
Ayesha Raees عائشہ رئیس
is a poet and artist identifying as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms.
Her interdisciplinary work places poetry at its center and delves into paint, film, sound, theater, performance, and collaboration with the intention of breaking conventional ideas of linear language, form, and genre to materialize a space of belonging for marginalia and their narratives.
Her work strongly revolves around issues of belonging and dislocation, G/god and spirituality, and beauty::cruelty while possessing a strong agency for decolonial, anti-violence, and anti-erasure practices.
She edits poetry at the Whiting Award Winning Magazine The Margins and has received endorsements from Asian American Writers Workshop, Kundiman, Brooklyn Poets, UNESCO, Millay Colony For The Arts and elsewhere.
Her work has been published extensively, including Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, The Nation, Poets.org and others.
Her first book of poems Coining A Wishing Tower won the Broken River Prize and was published by Radix in 2024. She is based in New York City and Lahore, Pakistan (and many other unsettled spaces).
