Timeless and timely, there is verse and music in Diaspora Blues tuned by an acute intelligence. Ali Jimale Ahmeds pithy and elegant lines span the range from the classical Arabic jewels of an al-Maari, to the kind of ironies that grace the discursive English Restoration wit of Pope and Swift--and all this delivered with the lucidity of the vocal pronouncements of a modern-day griot. As an indefatigable traveler of worlds and times, Ahmed brings the news of our weary millennium home.
-Ammiel Alcalay
In Diaspora Blues, Somali poet Ali Jimale Ahmed--as a person without a state in a contest/With the globe--recounts a lyrical odyssey, confronting the worlds monsters, storms and temptations with the glittering safe harbor of his visionary poetic strength.
-Charles Cantalupo