It’s a quarter past
the fear of being terrorised
and forty-five minutes to
the sadism of being the aggressor

Joanne Scicluna writes, ‘These lines from Ali Alizadeh’s recent collection of poetry evoke the struggle that is at the heart of this work: the struggle with the designation of ‘otherness’ – an otherness that is, in the words of the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin, only contingent, external, illusory. Alizadeh’s poetry expresses a yearning for dissolution of category; a dismantling of the fictions of East and West.”