“Reading #25wtT is like an old wine in a new wineskin. It is rich with lovely, evocative mystical insights, put into a format that is engaging, contemporary, and profoundly personal. There’s something about the brevity of these poems that cuts right to the heart of the matter… and our own hearts. Highly recommended for all spiritual seekers, particularly those of the Sufi tradition.”
—Dr. Omid Safi, Duke University
“Arthur Skip Maselli is that rare world citizen artist; an All-American son of Hafiz whose reflections don’t just synthesize what is highest and truest from East to West, but elevate him even more. I recommend this gifted poet’s writing with one proviso, prepare to be haunted by it.”
—Maureen Seaberg, coauthor of Struck By Genius: How A Brain Injury Made Me A Mathematical Marvel (HMH, 2014
“I came across, ‘Twenty-five words towards the truth’ accidentally. As I delved into its depths, I was immediately captured by the beauty and brevity of the verses. I was carried away from the “world” in its ugliest aspects into the realm of peace. In Maselli’s verses the reader encounters the wisdom of a searching man, who pours out his feelings as little lullabies. It seems as if in every word a whole universe is concealed.
Twenty-five words towards the Truth is undoubtedly a marriage between literary art and mystical experience, which is capable of conveying the subtlest ideas in a manner that is as seductive as it is instructive. Maselli sings verses about the universe around him whose voice he is able to understand.His poetry seems to carry the fragrance of all mystic poets like Hafiz, Attar, Ansari…”
—Dr. Ahmad Javid Sarwari Qaderi, Sufi teacher and writer