Ayesha Raees’ debut volume, Coining a Wishing Tower (Platypus Press, 2022), is a dizzying, tragic, and gorgeous treatise on desire, grief, and its associated delusions. The book is told over 56 short, untitled parables containing three narrative threads over two planes of reality. Two of the three threads are closer to fable. They operate through allegory and are populated by personified animals, places, and things: a narcissistic fish named Godfish, a tower resident named House Mouse, a house in the town of New London, Connecticut, the sun, the moon, the cat, etc.

Apart from whimsical naming, what jumps in these passages is straightforward sentence construction, unique usage of otherwise ordinary words, and third-person narration that is devoid of pronouns. The effect is simple and profound: stripped of ornamentation and convention, the reader’s eye gets stuck, setting squarely on the actions and the animate or inanimate characters who commit them. In the tale of a four-way love complex marred by desire and misunderstanding, we see each character with a heightened state of agency. We examine more closely their psychologies, their rationales, their actions. The lighthearted names contrast and amplify the desires being voiced, the heartbreaks suffered: “One dawn, Godfish wished, with great heart, to go on a journey, for the air to become so thick with vapor, it would become an ocean. It would allow a big possible swim up and up towards the sun.”

The third thread lives in conventional reality where we watch the narrator grapple with her relationship with culture, faith, and family, as well as place, belonging, and home. Throughout these stories, the author shows remarkable ability to employ passing commentary as allegory for broad, layered socio-cultural realities. Early in the book, the narrator is reluctant to bargain over a broom alongside her mother in Pakistan: “I do not believe ten rupees more or less could change him or his life. Above me, the sun turns my country to a boil. I clear my throat. I start my training for bargains. I say to him, Hello, Assalam u Alaikum. My mother hits me with the broom.”

That so much of the book functions through allegory is something the author uses to her advantage. As we read, the parables begin to mirror and contextualize each other. More, they have no titles, no chapters, and the book has no table of contents. There is a simple numbering scheme, and even that is thrown off by four half-parables that spring from the bases of their preceding parables, highlighting not often a twist but rather a final piece of information required to close a circuit, to convey a meaning in equal parts insightful and devastating.

This flurry of structural tools allows the author to build a book that—much like its concepts—is linear and cyclical, individual and categorical, heartbreaking and heartwarming. This matching of delivery with content allows us to become submerged in her world, to see it for all its complication and paradox. This, in a prose that makes beauty of the calamity it describes: “I felt around me a surge of water, held together in collect, in duty, by a bulletproof glass so thick even my father’s snores failed to penetrate it. I watched my mother mutter Ameen, blow it at me, and drown as soon as I grew gills.”