RECORD RECORD SERIES
Ripe Feathers, by Ahmed Zaid
Spring 2025
Open for pre-order now!
“Ahmed Zaid’s Ripe Feathers is a welcome debut. The poems take risks—intellectually, linguistically, and poetically—and the payoff is a brilliant mix of the profound, playful, and lyrical. This is more than a welcome debut—it’s surprising and engaging, and it promises more to come. I, for one, took notice. I think you should, too.”
- Hayan Chara
"Ahmed Zaid’s chapbook, Ripe Feathers, centers around a first generation Arab-American ill at ease, if not homeless, in his adopted home. These poems are written not from the predictable margins of an old or new world, but from the abrasive and destabilizing sense of being in between and yet beholden to different worlds, different cultures, different languages. Zaid doesn’t adapt himself to the conventions and idioms of American English; rather, and more creatively, he adapts the new language, the new conventions, to render as painstakingly as possible his heartbreaking and inspiring sense of strangeness which, ironically, is precisely what makes these movingly elusive poems so quintessentially American."
- Alan Shapiro
“In Ahmed Zaid’s Ripe Feathers the world is askew, split between, and often in perpetual motion and change. But what remains constant here is his rooted verse and his concentrated language working to articulate the intimate and daily realities of diasporic living. Zaid’s poems re-orient us to the interiority of Arab-America and give us a way of seeing that forms a new world, neither here, or there.”
– Matthew Shenoda
RECORD RECORD is a series of debut chapbooks by NYC poets that consider the myriad ways our spacetime bends, warps, and frays across our shared realities. These chapbooks archive, calculate, and remix within the landscapes of cities, cosmos, and crises, offering language for motion and survival.
Series editors: Ashna Ali, Nico Bryan, Arden Levine & danilo machado
Cover design: Rodrigo Moreira
The Record Record series was made possible by the generous support of Ashna Ali, Julia Brandt, Joey De Jesus, Joel Dodge, Sarah Glidden, Jim Hayman, Karen Hildebrand, Peter Johnson, Arden Levine, danilo machado, Monica McClure, Navila Nahid, Leila Ortiz, Christine Scanlon, David Solo, Susanna Stephens, Kendra Sullivan, Morgan Võ, Candace Williams, Matthew Williams & Ariel Yelen.
free pdf available later this year
Donations (suggested $2-10) for pdf downloads support the production of upcoming chapbooks.