Tiel Aisha Ansari is a Sufi warrior poet. Her work has been featured by Fault Lines Poetry, Windfall, KBOO and an Everyman’s Library anthology, among others. Her collections include Knocking from Inside, High-Voltage Lines, Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare’s Stable, and The Day of My First Driving Lesson (including the Pushcart-nominated “1969”). She works as a data analyst for the Portland Public School district and is president emerita of the Oregon Poetry Association. She hosts the Wider Window Poetry show on KBOO Community Radio, https://www.kboo.fm/program/widerwindow-poetry. Visit her online at knockingfrominside.blogspot.com
“The vines of her lines twist into musical knots of devoted observation, mystic paradox, honorable question, and lyric proof of connection.”
–Kim Stafford, author of Wild Honey, Tough Salt
“What a joy it is to be illuminated by these poems, to be touched by the force and heat of their vision.”
–Annie Lighthart, author of Pax
“The reader learns fresh ways of seeing and feeling as Ansari follows her spiritual wind.”
–Bill Siverly, author of Nightfall
“You will finish this book with pleasure and perhaps a renewed reverence for all our lives.”
–Penelope Scambly Schott, author of A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth (Oregon Book Award for Poetry) and On Dufur Hill (2020)
“These lyric poems seamlessly merge with narrative to ‘witness’ and embrace the individual and collective, the sacred, the natural and man-made disasters that affect us all.”
–Willa Schneberg, recipient of the Oregon Book Award in Poetry
“Ansari interviews dervishes, ghosts, and lions…. Her poems are incandescent.”
–Scot Siegel, Untitled Country Review
