Praise for Baraka Blue and The Art of Remembrance
“Baraka Blue has taken his place as the leading exponent of Sufi inspired verse in the English language and the clear successor to the late Daniel Abdal Hayy Moore who virtually invented the genre. The poet Caroline Forche called Moore “a rarity among his contemporaries - a surrealist of the sacred.” By contrast, the younger poet might be called “a realist of the sacred.” His poetry invokes the immediacy of the Divine Presence as a constant,contemplative reality. He looks for God in everything, never deviating from this essential vision. The Art of Remembrance is another tour de force from the American Muslim poet, a rich collection of verse steeped in the metaphysical language of Islamic spirituality, with a subliminal Hip-Hop heartbeat.”
— Michael Sugich - author of Signs on the Horizon, Heart’s Turn, & Exemplars for our Time
“Baraka Blue’s [writing] is a brilliant and profound contemporary reflection on the very best of Sufi poetry, and itself an extension of that tradition. A thousand years ago, Sufi poetry found sublime expressions in Persian, and then Urdu and Turkish among other languages. Today, we are witnessing the emergence of Sufi poetry in English. What a joy to witness this birth.”
— Omid Safi, Duke University - author of Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition
“Baraka Blue's poetry is not only beautiful, powerful, lyrical and profound, it also has this unique ability to awaken something deep within the reader, to help us remember ancient wisdom that many of our species have forgotten. This is more than art, it is alchemy."
— Adeyinka Muhammad Mendes - poet, teacher, translator and founder of the Nibras Foundation
“In these moving lines, the call of the eternal reverberates in the rhythms of the present. In Baraka Blue one hears the teachings of Rumi, Ibn Ata'allah and others in a form that echoes the voice of Walt Whitman.”
— Joseph Lumbard - The Study Quran, translator, commentary writer, general editor
“As Emerson wrote to Whitman upon first reading Leaves of Grass, so I write...Baraka Blue, 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”
— Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore - poet, essayist, playwright and author of Dawn Visions (City Lights Books)
“As with other languages in the past, the fecundating rains of the Quranic revelation have begun to coax forth blossoms of profound spiritual poetry from the English language. Like the first blooms of spring, the appearance of this garden of verses is cause for celebration—not only of the timeless wisdom and beauty reflected therein—but of the coming flood of English Sufi poetry of which this collection is a harbinger.”
– Oludamini Ogunnaike - University of Virginia, author of Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Madih Poetry and Its Precedents
“Baraka Blue’s poems are the songs of a soul suffused with devotion to the Prophet, the boundaryless horizons of Revelation, and echoes of hip hop.”
— Kabir Helminski - translator and author of Living Presence and The Pocket Rumi, Sufism.org
“In The Art of Remembrance contemporary Sufi poet Baraka Blue offers a window into his soul by sharing the majestic and creative ways in which the world of English forms can give voice to and crystallize for seekers the primordial silence and spiritual meanings that reside in the world of the Formless.”