The much-anticipated debut collection by the winner of the Outspoken Performance Poetry Prize: a tender meditation on queerness and Islam
Intricately weaving Quranic verse with the hip-hop soundtrack of her childhood, Sanah Ahsan’s poems form a raw and honest self-portrait, an exhilarating exploration of intergenerational trauma, whiteness, masculinity, grief, shame and self-compassion. In these pages, belief and unbelief, goodness and badness, the material and the spiritual are intertwined, reclaiming queer love and desire as holy.
Refusing binaries of gender or religious doctrine, I cannot be good until god says it finds what is sacred in the grey spaces of morality, advancing imagination and self-compassion as sites of communion. This debut collection is a call to prayer for queer people of colour navigating a faith background.