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.
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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.
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Naomi Shihab Nye
