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THE GOLD SHOP OF BA-'ALI

THE GOLD SHOP OF BA-'ALI

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9911465-2-9

Pub Date: Spring 2014

Pages: 80


By Yahya Frederickson


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE for POETRY 2013


The Gold Shop of Ba-‘Ali delivers us into an Arab world stripped of exoticism, a world made palpable by mundane reality, an ordinary world made luminous by the vision and speech of a genuinely gifted poet.

—Sam Hamill, Final Judge for the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2013


Yahya Frederickson’s rich poems—weaving a world, shaping a place of filigreed detail, savory scent, “little bundles of herbs” and encounters, invite us to cross an invisible bridge. Here, in a land he is bound to through experience and marriage, a land of most ecstatic architecture, Yemen—we find gracefully created, intricate room-on-room dimensions of human lives, legacies, and linkage. May poems like these be protection for the precious spaces and breaths of attentive exchange.

—Naomi Shihab Nye



    Yahya Frederickson has experienced a world that very few Americans have, and to say the least, we’re fortunate for his eloquence in capturing and sharing it. Again and again in these well-crafted poems and prose poems there are startling moments:

    “. . . a ragged old man tramps by looking like a bedouin, a holy man in hard plastic shoes, banging his walking staff on the pavement and reciting poetry, which, even though I can’t understand, I know is poetry . . . and now he’s dancing—banging his staff in rhythm, stamping a couple steps forward, a couple steps back, BANG!—I’ve got to admit that I am feeling it too, so I put my arms up in the air like his, he grasps my wrist, and suddenly we’re dancing together. . . .”


    So, too, do we all learn to feel the poetry of these places, to keep on dancing through this richly imagistic excursion from a pediatrician’s office to a cemetery, from restaurants and shops to deserts and mountains. I’ve known since I first read drafts of some of these poems that one day they’d be published as a wonderful book, and I’m simply delighted that they have been.

    —Mark Vinz


    Yahya Frederickson teaches writing and literature at Minnesota State University Moorhead. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and a PhD in English from the University of North Dakota. Between graduate degrees he taught in Yemen, initially as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He served as a Fulbright Scholar in Syria in 2005 and in Saudi Arabia in 2011. He is the author of three chapbooks, including Month of Honey, Month of Missiles (Three by Three: Tigertail Annual, 2009); Returning to Water (Dacotah Territory, 2006); and Trilogy (Dacotah Territory, 1985, with Julie Taylor and Richard Schetnan). His poetry has appeared in Arts & Letters, Black Warrior Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, CutBank, Hanging Loose, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and many other journals.

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