Each character felt so real and alive that I could meet them on the streets and have a nice conversation about their life. Paul Kareem Tayyar is talented and this shows in this polished tale of a young man following a path laid out by a letter written by his father. Go out and read it!

Writerly Words

Don’t pigeonhole Paul Kareem Tayyar. While the short, gnomic poems of 'Postmark Atlantis' have elements of surrealism, parable, myth, and folk tale, many of them have even bigger surprises […] that, as with all the best poetry, elude categories.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Author of "Goodnight, Gracie" and "Cairo Traffic

I long for such hope, transcendence, and honesty in a collection. A book that acts as both a mirror to the world and the world within this world, and I am thankful for Tayyar’s 'Magic Carpet Poems' for being one of those rare collections that transport me in the very ways I need to be transported.

Author of "Waiting for a Warm Body to Fill It" and "Bird Blind"

Tayyar’s marvelous novella is a son’s mythic quest for his father, a romp through the pop culture of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and a portrait of the father as a hell-raising young man, who landed in America from Iran with ‘a jacket, a suitcase, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the fights of Muhammad Ali.’ I finished this book thinking, ‘This is my America,’ where baseball, poetry, Prince, and driving all night on a side road or highway listening to a car radio can open up the past and everything to come.

Distinguished University Scholar, Writer-in-Residence, Guggenheim Fellow, and author of “Lester Higata’s 20th Century

Reading Paul Kareem Tayyar you are always aware of being in the presence of an electric, first-rate mind, a poet with a real voice—as if the author is there with you in person, guiding you through his sun-drenched world of bumper stickers and surfers, movie stars and sports heroes, making it all magical and, by seeing it through the humanity of its people, and the refraction of his love, making it real. The poet overwhelms resistance with his generosity of spirit, staggering energy, and above all with his charm—all the fantasy and sweetness still alive in him from childhood. If this book were put in a time capsule, the distance generation who dug it up could reconstruct from his poems what his corner of the planet was like in our era, and get to know a marvelously-talented poet.

Author of “After the Fall: Poems Old and New” and “A Frieze for a Temple of Love"

Sometimes serious, partly romantic and always grounded in an astounding knowledge of the world at large, this is a simple story that branches out as the protagonist takes a trip down memory lane or steps into quagmires that life throws his way. Sprinkling extra charm is the illustrative, almost lyrical, language, which transports the reader directly onto the scene of each page.

LA Times on "In the Footsteps of the Silver King"

Tayyar has given us a collection of poems stunningly simple and yet filled with a depth of wisdom and experience, each page transporting us into a world filled with magic and the mystical energy of hope.

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

It is a cliche that you can’t write a good poem about happiness. Like most cliches, this is based on the truth. Most happy poems turn unbearably sappy. Yet Paul Kareem Tayyar has written not just one good happy poem, but a whole book of them. How does he do it?

Tayyar succeeds in this mission by focusing on the things which make him happy, not on the emotion itself. Only occasionally does he even say these things make him happy, he just lets the objects of the poems speak for themselves.

Poetry for Southern California, poetix.net