I cannot be good until you say it

(Paperback)

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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, psychology, and the hip-hop soundtrack of their childhood, Sanahs poems reach for divinity in the body; an archive that refuses erasure. These poems traverse unruly emotional and physical landscapes, Whiteness, islamophobia, homophobia, intergenerational suffering, and the politics of therapeutic processes. In these pages, belief and unbelief, goodness and badness, the material and spiritual are intertwined, reclaiming queer love and desire as holy. How are we incarcerated by others gazes Who gets to be good in a society built upon hierarchy How might we embrace each others madnesses Sanah Ahsan asks questions that travel to the heart of our humanness, bending the lines between psychologist and client to show us the sacred nature of our wounds. These poems kneel to the messiness of being alive, building altars to complication and presence. Refusing binaries of gender or religious doctrine, I cannot be good until you say it finds what is to be revered in the grey spaces of morality, advancing imagination and self-compassion as sites of communion. This debut collection is a call to prayer, fearlessly complicating what is good, and what is god.

Reviews

Sanah Ahsan's poetry is an exhilarating declaration of love and an invocation to bare the soul * GUARDIAN *
Sanah Ahsan's writing is like a healing balm, even with the deepest of wounds. With grace, light, hope and generosity of spirit, Ahsan paints a vision of the world that can be home to us all. A majestic talent -- AMROU AL-KADHI, author of Unicorn

Author Bio

Sanah Ahsan is a writer, liberation psychologist and educator. Their work has been awarded the Out-Spoken Performance Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the White Review Poets Prize and the Bridport Prize. Sanah has also been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition and Frontier Poetry Prize. sanahahsan.com