Wee Sparrow Reviews

The Relativity of Living Well by Ashna Ali reviewed by Wee Sparrow Reviews Director, Nitika Balaram

The Relativity of Living Well (Bone Bouquet, 2024) is a debut poetry collection of candid and beautiful poems by Ashna Ali that will make you feel alive. It is a powerful portrayal of intertwined themes such as community, disability, politics, grief, love, the COVID-19 pandemic, and identity, rooted in poetic memoir. I highly recommend reading Ashna’s poems. They provided a balm for my soul that I didn’t know I needed in a world where “[t]here’s no room for grief we can’t sell.” A word of warning: you will need to keep tissues handy before diving in!

Another key theme that strongly underlines this collection is survival. We don’t often talk about our experiences of surviving the past few years in this way — the collective truth and reckoning of our world “in the wake of the COVID mitigation years and the haunting of our geopolitical contexts.” Ashna recalls in a poem: “I tell my students, report this moment with the details of your lives.” At the core of Ashna’s poems are the vulnerable vignettes that document these details to help us remember and reflect; emerge from the pain; and heal in truth with our community. Their poetry collection reminded me of that sacred power.

Ashna is a talented poet with a versatile voice, who delves deep into wounds and realities we can all recognise in our own memories:

“Today I am thankful for being a kitchen kid.
Old abilities to make joys from the disparate and forgotten. 

Today I learn that my father thought I had a beautiful singing voice 
as a child. I want to tell the girl, but I have sent her

to seek peace amongst trees and rivers
so that, upon return, I can beg freshly

upon her lap. Again, NYPD copters julienne the sky.
Inspire first fantasies of bazookas. 

I learn that a daughter withstands her father’s wrath 
to hold him through grief like a mother.” 

Ashna has an effervescent capacity to convey layered emotions through words. Their sensory storytelling is woven like a tapestry interspersed with mirrors of shared experiences. I saw myself sometimes, and sometimes I saw “queer crips and kin” reflected with such raw candour and a healthy dose of dark humour. The focus on communal survival for disabled folks is captured perfectly “when joy feels just as far as rage, which, combined, feel like nothing.” Ashna finds the precise words that others may not be able to articulate and assembles them in a punchy, poignant way with “whatever honesty we have left between the sofa cushions.”

Ashna plays with form and poetic devices such as alliteration, metaphor, personification, capitalisation, and text alignment (to name a few) in an immersive way that makes the poems dance on the page. Their poem, ‘Assisted Release’ encapsulates their style:

“I dig through old wounds in case 
		   surveillance backdrop 
	   or disease 
		   tweak the narrative. 

	   The body slips like filleted fish 
into poach water 
		   unable to stop 
	   from hooking the gut 
for profit, power, play.” 

‘Plague Summer 2020: A Soundscape’ also highlights their creative use of form as each stanza alternates between left-aligned and right-aligned text in a delicious way that deepens the poem. It is filled with meaningful lines like: “Forgive me. I have to call things by their names before they ooze back together. Before the whole of my skin beetles itself against the day.”

The evocative poems in Ashna’s collection leapt off the page, opened my heart, and will stay with me. Any book that demands us to feel so viscerally is a true gift. I found myself laughing, crying, staring at the page, re-reading certain lines, and often re-reading entire poems the moment I finished them. I know that I will return to this book again to greet the “sun’s pale yolk”, further examine “[b]loodsliced motherlands” and reverently observe how Ashna’s “machete mouth” paints the “neglectful empire” with honest brushstrokes. No line is superfluous; each is crafted with skill to fit in harmonious sync with the beat of the heart at the centre of each poem. Likewise, each word is plucked and arranged with purpose, showcasing their poetic talent and linguistic intelligence.

I adored their depictions of the mundane observations of everyday life through the intuitive language of the body: “Headline scroll, unload the dishwasher, drop my jaw for mascara before shoes.” They also didn’t shy away from probing the dire dilemmas facing humanity: “In the land of milk and honey, we slide into glut that gloms into bodies upon bodies, mass graves.” Ashna’s poems also have an innate strength which reflects in the physical and emotional ways they navigate the ongoing pandemic in their queer, disabled, brown body. They unapologetically explore the corners of our current world and how they have added layers of grief and anger to our daily routines:

“Severe weather warning for two inches of rain, but the forecast also says 
no bombs in my sky, no boys who look like my brother kneeling nude 
at gunpoint on my horizon. What’s a bit of rain.”

I will treasure the moments of stillness and reflection that Ashna’s poems gave me, in the simple act of witnessing and sharing their pain and joy. As they expressed: “This is a selfie. I’m sharing. Look.” What struck me most vividly and repeatedly in this collection of stunning poems was how Ashna refused to conform or pretend; this is their truth and The Relativity of Living Well.

---

You can buy a copy of The Relativity of Living Well here. I also highly recommend the experience of listening to Ashna narrate their poems with vibrant vulnerability on their recent episode on The Wee Sparrow Poetry Podcast here.

Ashna Ali is a queer, disabled child of the Bangladeshi diaspora raised in Italy and based in Brooklyn. They are the author of the collection The Relativity of Living Well (Bone Bouquet, 2024) and the Substack,

PAIN BABY

. They serve as the Poetry Editor for Epiphany Magazine, and began their MFA in poetry at Randolph College in December 2024.

You can connect with and learn more about Ashna on their Instagram or website.

If you’re interested in a Wee Sparrow Review of your own poetry collection, click here for more information.

Illustration of bookworm sparrow: Colin Thom

Author photo: Sean Devare

Book Cover art & design: Katia Engell

(Image Description: A collage of images on a white background including a watercolour illustration of a bookworm sparrow with the text ‘Wee Sparrow Reviews’, an orange book cover with a flying fish and the text ‘The Relativity of Living Well Ashna Ali’, an image of Ashna Ali, a smiling person with dark hair, and a logo with a black outlined sparrow and the text ‘The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press’)

---

Exciting News!

The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press is delighted to welcome Ashna Ali to our team. They join Nitika as a Wee Sparrow book reviewer. A very warm welcome to the team, Ashna!