Publisher's Synopsis
This new collection of poems, Zero and One, is at once an exploration of what it means to be corporeal and yet not, digital, and yet organic. Informed by the parallels in the evolution of both the human experience and the sciences, this collection, a marriage of opposites, is at its best when it confronts head-on the paradoxes of mathematics, existence, religion, and human understanding. Perhaps what is most striking about this collection is the powerful use of repeated themes and imagery. Each time we revisit a familiar theme or image, something new is added - sometimes a new perspective, at others a powerful line that makes us sit up and take notice in a way only great poetry can. Whether we are tracking the history of tectonic plates, the power of the feminine, or even of creation itself, Ahmed reminds us that all this is infinitely connected to itself and to our modern experience. And where this might be intimidating or lost in minutia had these poems been written by a lesser talent, Ahmed, easily returns us through, as he puts it, the closed but somehow open circle to the moments of joy that are creation, discovery, and the recognition of beauty-be it natural, digital, mathematically theoretical, or spiritual. The poems explore the relationship between the impossible ideals that are necessarily inside of beneath our corporeal bodies, the earth itself, and even how we encounter and discover knowledge, or science. As our awareness and experience of the world around us transcends the organic into the digital, old symbols, like one and zero, are imbued with new meaning. Fathima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad and the perfect ideal of the woman kind is the central figure appears throughout these verses. Fathima moves with the power of creation and the celebration it brings. Fathima is the perfect embodiment of the female form, which is itself the most beautiful part of nature, her presence is literally, "heaven on earth" for our corporeal existence. Yes, the earth, "touched [its] dream" when Fathima, "bent with paradise/like a flower bends in the breeze." The deep connection between this world and it's dream of perfection that somehow walked the earth for a while cannot be severed by death, for this earth dreamed of Fathima before she arrived, and now returns to its natural state of longing for the perfection of paradise that eludes the world to this day. Here we see paradise beside itself with joy over the apotheosis of Fathima, over the ground where she stands. We find in these poems a sort of universal binary code, a continuously churning equation that is at once highly structured and formulated-the never-ending harmonic motion of the spheres-and endlessly fungible. In a cosmology in which a series of equations governs the universe, there is an escape from this seemingly harsh determinism in the form of pi itself. Pi carries with it every digit and every possible arrangement of numbers. Pi produces new digits ad infinitum, its limits never attainable. As we approach the ends of the equation and we fear for the closing off of the frontiers of meaning, pi simply produces another digit, and then another. We read of an intelligent design where numbers are essence and essence precedes existence: Allah created pi before the circle, and the circle preceded the orbital, the sphere, and the earth. However, it is also Allah that placed at man's center a one where there was zero: one wonder, one desire to discover the underlying mathematics of nature and reality. Allah created pi, but it is man who discovered pi and all of its endless relations with the natural world. In these poems, we can see a line, a circle, a pyramid; we can see the Earth, set at its proper angle in the solar system. Yet meaning endlessly dissolves into further sublime equations. We only know what one is because we know what zero is; we only know a straight line because we know of the circle.
