POETRY
Poet Lore (print)
"No Country for Young Women"
Spring 2023
MudRoom Magazine
GASHER Journal
Pleiades
"Water is a sin" and "on returning"
forthcoming 2023
Abandon Journal
AAWW's The Margins
Bending Genres
"My father used to wake up at midnight /
to fumigate restaurants. That is how he paid for our language."
October 2021
Substantially Unlimited
beestung
Jersey Devil Press
Scrawl Place
Stone Poetry Quarterly
"I have been thinking a lot about birds lately. How their smallness makes the sky / feel infinite. How when they come to the ground, / they are still something of the sky."
May 2022
Always Crashing
Superstition Review
Anti-heroin Chic!
Gutter magazine (Print)
"What is this world if not my hands reaching yours?"
February 2022
The Aleph Review (Print)
"How To Grow a Flower"
"Lies Not Told Yet"
July 2021
PROSE
Head in the Clouds
Isele Magazine, July 2023
"I’d lied at school. My neck did not hurt from looking up at my house’s high ceilings or the sky too much. It actually pained from perpetually looking down. Although that wasn’t my fault either. Amma taught me to walk looking down. She said it was the way of our beloved Prophet Muhammad. Eyes are the greatest, most vulnerable way into sin. Keep them down, she taught Piru and I."
Bride
Mascara Literary Review, May 2023
"Mama was the only one interested in our teenage love lives, and the only one we weren’t scared to tell them to. On weekends with her, we stayed up through the night talking about the people we had a crush on and stalking them on Facebook. In return, Mama told us about hers. She was so nonchalant about the men—like those heroines you see in Bollywood films. Too cool for the boys. Casual and unbothered, and secretly playing hard to get. I could still sense some sadness in how she talked, so dissociated from herself, as if recounting a story from a past life, or of another person. She never told us about her husband or her marriage. And we knew better than to ask."
Skirting with the Sonnet: Tender Machines Book Review
diaCRITICS, August 2023
The music in Tender Machines is bursting at the seams. Reading these poems evoked a similar feeling as listening to Urdu and Farsi ghazals from my childhood—composed in set melodies, called raag, a rich poetic tradition in South Asia. One of the charming qualities of a ghazal is its use of repetition to evoke lyricism—in the form of radif, which is the refrain at the end of every second hemistich, or takrar, which is the repetition of certain words or phrases within a couplet. In “Lux Aeterna,” a sonnet which appears through the later half of the book, Barizo writes:
Tell me
that I remember it correctly, that the light
will lick and lick the damage clean. That it is not
ruin already. Tell me.
Of Land and Of Water
short story, forthcoming from Scrawl Place!
Ek Jhooti Love Story: what we're missing
TNS, 2021
"The show, although lighthearted, treads with care on social issues such as rishta culture, the notion of a marriageable age for women, difficulties of the middle class and aspirations of social mobility. It does all of this in a non-preachy and engaging way – a fairly new sensibility for Pakistani dramas. Ek Jhooti Love Story premiered as a Zee5 Original in November 2020, after the tremendous success of Churails, both across the region and globally."
Korean Dramas and their Pakistani Audience
TNS, 2021
"For the Pakistani audience, Korean dramas are distinct enough to be charming yet familiar enough to be comforting. We can relate better to these characters than to the ones in American shows, given our shared values and cultures. One recognizes it when one sees it: Captain Ri always takes his shoes off before entering his home."