COINING A WISHING TOWER by Ayesha Raees

Coining a Wishing Tower is a meditation on death and the afterlife—and the irresistible pull between the two.

“In the end, living is dying many times in one singular life,” writes Ayesha Raees, inviting you to consider the departures that make up one lifetime. The splintering of a voice from domestic life, the defiance of wisdom leaving childhood behind, the egress from one’s country of birth, and the non-permanence of life and inanimate objects become the rich pasture for the hybrid epic poems in this collection. 

Through investigation of family, faith, empire, and desire, Raees sutures together parables, both real and imagined, as concrete prose-poems of chronicle and whimsy. Imagination here is populated by House Mouse running towards “the end of all possible height,” Godfish swimming in “an aquarium sea,” oblivious to the moon’s infatuation, and a cat, helplessly in love with Godfish. Nestled among them is the speaker: a daughter who desires to leave, an alien who wishes to hang herself on a wound in New York City, a philosopher who coos, “The bare minimum to life… is to just live.”

With precise instincts and the sweeping ambition of a fable-maker, a bright new voice marks her debut in American poetry.

Coining a Wishing Tower is a meditation on death and the afterlife—and the irresistible pull between the two.

“In the end, living is dying many times in one singular life,” writes Ayesha Raees, inviting you to consider the departures that make up one lifetime. The splintering of a voice from domestic life, the defiance of wisdom leaving childhood behind, the egress from one’s country of birth, and the non-permanence of life and inanimate objects become the rich pasture for the hybrid epic poems in this collection. 

Through investigation of family, faith, empire, and desire, Raees sutures together parables, both real and imagined, as concrete prose-poems of chronicle and whimsy. Imagination here is populated by House Mouse running towards “the end of all possible height,” Godfish swimming in “an aquarium sea,” oblivious to the moon’s infatuation, and a cat, helplessly in love with Godfish. Nestled among them is the speaker: a daughter who desires to leave, an alien who wishes to hang herself on a wound in New York City, a philosopher who coos, “The bare minimum to life… is to just live.”

With precise instincts and the sweeping ambition of a fable-maker, a bright new voice marks her debut in American poetry.

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SKU: RM-CAWT Category: Books Tags: ayesha raees, debut, pakistan, poetry, south asian literature literature

What People are Saying

“Ayesha Raees’s Coining a Wishing Tower is everything I hope to find when I read a book of poetry—fearless reckoning with unprecedented experience spoken in a singular, deeply and importantly strange lyric voice. My luck, to get to help introduce it to you. Your luck, to get to read it for the first time.”

—Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“You are entering a world of Ayesha Raees’ making, a lyric fable woven in tight silk strands. Singular in its voice and imagination, Coining a Wishing Tower is unyielding in its search for truth, for a spiritual tether. Its allegories remind us of what’s holy in the everyday: a mother’s faith, a father’s machinery, a moon in love with a goldfish, the omniscience of Google. She writes, ‘On fifth avenue, I want to be important. I want to hammer a nail into the New York sky. I want to hang myself on its wound’ That’s Raees daring you to leave unchanged.”

—Ruth Awad, Outside the Joy

“Ayesha Raees’ Coining a Wishing Tower is a beautiful epic, told through prose poems that surprise with precise and wondrous language. Raees thinks through art, place, family, life, and the afterlife, animating the collection through various characters—House Mouse, Godfish, the moon—and mediating it all through a Pakistani, Muslim, and woman speaker, who traverses racialized and gendered spaces’ pilgrimages of faith and of the imagination; knowing and unknowing. In this debut, we find a bright and wild new voice in poetry.”

—Cathy Linh Che, Split

“With Coining a Wishing Tower, Ayesha Raees’ intercultural, interreligious meditation on family life, childhood, memory, and death, comes a bold imagination populated with a cat and a moon both in love with a Godfish, a House Mouse who performs rituals, where death is one such ritual, and a child who tells their father that ‘The bare minimum to life…is to just live.’ At its core, this collection wrestles with grief amidst life between cultures, religions, and geographic places. After hammering a nail into the sky, the speaker reveals, ‘I want to hang myself on its wound,’ and so too, was I rapt, hanging on the words of Raees’ fashioned wound.”

—Diana Khoi Nguyen, Root Fractures

“Ayesha Raees’s Coining a Wishing Tower is an exciting debut collection that traverses multiple dimensions and landscapes, both metaphorical and physical. By skillfully playing with the theme of real or not-real, Raees invites the reader to meditate on what constitutes ‘real’ in the first place. The poet explores multiple other themes that play off one another—longing, belonging, departure, arrival, life, death, prayer, performance, and love, to name a few—through recurring figures that reflect and refract one another’s desires. By rendering the figures’ thoughts and situations into prose poetry, Raees also formally illustrates the various enclosures that serve to both trap and liberate the figures. Smart and imaginative, Coining a Wishing Tower is one worth reading over and over for the rich imagery and storytelling; a book that offers a new discovery at each savoring.”

—Emily Yoon, Find Me as the Creature I Am 

Ayesha Raees is a poet and artist identifying as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her work strongly revolves around issues of belonging and dislocation, G/god and spirituality, and beauty::cruelty while possessing a strong agency for decolonial, anti-violence, and anti-erasure practices.  She edits poetry at The Margins and has been endorsed by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, UNESCO, and others. Her first book, Coining a Wishing Tower, won the Broken River Prize and was published by Radix in 2024. She is based in New York City and Lahore, Pakistan (and many other unsettled spaces).

See more of her work at ayesharaees.com.