Book Launch: COINING A WISHING TOWER by Ayesha Raees

"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,” — Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

Coining a Wishing Tower is a meditation on death and the afterlife — and the irresistible pull between the two.

“In the end, living is dying many times in one singular life,” writes Ayesha Raees, inviting you to consider the departures that make up one lifetime. The splintering of a voice from domestic life, the defiance of wisdom leaving childhood behind, the egress from one’s country of birth, and the non-permanence of life and inanimate objects become the rich pasture for the hybrid epic poems in this collection. Through investigation of family, faith, empire, and desire, Raees sutures together parables, both real and imagined, as concrete prose-poems of chronicle and whimsy. With precise instincts and the sweeping ambition of a fable-maker, a bright new voice marks her debut in American poetry.

On Friday, October 4, Ayesha Raees will come together with peers in poetry and music to celebrate this incredible debut. Featuring readings by Jiaoyang Li, Meher Manda, and Jasmine Reid, and music by PRIYA, it will be an evening of verse, lyric, community, and cake.

About the Author:

Ayesha Raees عائشہ رئیس is a poet and artist identifying as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her work strongly revolves around issues of race and identity, belonging and dislocation, G/god and beauty while possessing a strong agency for decolonial, anti-violence, and anti-erasure practices. She edits poetry at 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).

Host or Publisher Radix Media