About the Book
The much-anticipated debut collection by the winner of the Outspoken Performance Poetry Prize: a tender meditation on queerness and Islam
'Dissolving whatever boundaries would wall us off from love, Ahsan finds a way to let it all be holy' Victoria Adukwei-Bulley
'When I speak of the word "sacred", Sanah Ahsan's I cannot be good until you say it will forever instantly spring to mind ... A masterpiece - an honour to have read this book, I am forever changed after reading its beauty' Nikita Gill
'Innovative and deeply compassionate ... multilingual verse suffused with a vital musicality and a palpable tenderness, Ahsan calls poetry into prayer and evokes a faith safe enough to be mothered by' Mary Jean Chan
'Dexterous, varied, erotic, filled with rage, worships and wonder ... I am electrified' Pádraig Ó Tuama
'Tensions of psychological drama, together with an induced sense of yearning.. what an artful and inspired set of poems' Anthony Anaxagorou
'Liberation is at the nucleus of every page of Sanah Ahsan's rousing debut ... Ahsan is doing liberation work, offering readers a prayer, a song, a hand to hold amidst the amidst' Kaveh Akbar
'A remarkable and transformative collection' Keith Jarrett
'A daring debut collection, which guides us through the complexities of just being' Yomi Sode
'Alive with a want and restlessness that remakes the "You" of desire - and faith - again and again' Will Harris
'A heart punching debut collection' Raymond Antrobus
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Intricately weaving Quranic verse, psychology, and the hip-hop soundtrack of their childhood, Sanah’s 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 other’s 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.
About the Author :
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 Poet’s Prize and the Bridport Prize. Sanah has also been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition and Frontier Poetry Prize.
sanahahsan.com
Review :
Dexterous, varied, erotic, filled with rage, worships and wonder ... I am electrified. If devotional poetry comes from the heart, then Ahsan’s language is a scalpel fit for such surgery
The clinical psychologist’s debut collection is a restless interrogation of various facets of their life and work: their relationship with Islam; queerness; danger in the therapy room. “White makes a muslim of threat. / Dogma makes a threat of queer. / A lie has a way of remaking itself.” Studded with Quranic quotations, Ahsan’s lines often break in ways that make the poems feel unsettled, but that still deliver moments of grace: “desire is a dragonfruit / we are almost tasting / you and the You that we don’t know.”
When I speak of the word “sacred”, Sanah Ahsan’s I cannot be good until you say it will forever instantly spring to mind. Each poem in this collection is a jewel crafted with such deep care - the musicality of the verse, the impact of memory on the language, the precision of themes like family and memory, sexuality and religion all blend together to create this masterpiece. An honour to have read this book, I am forever changed after reading its beauty
In this innovative and deeply compassionate debut, the path towards love and liberation is fraught with difficulties: structural violence abounds in empire’s wake, and trauma dwells intergenerationally within the body. Even the "[white] experts of / suffering’ have little to offer, with therapy being depicted as ‘a god / of individualisms’ while a doctor ‘plucks a blue pill for the towers burning". The "I" of Ahsan’s poems are caught between competing loyalties, in which the impossibility of being good lies merely one letter away from god and the possibility of grace. Through multilingual verse suffused with a vital musicality and a palpable tenderness, Ahsan calls poetry into prayer and evokes a faith safe enough to be mothered by
These heart-filled poems walk courageously in pursuit of the divine within the everyday, the sacred within the embodied. Dissolving whatever boundaries that would wall us off from love, Ahsan finds a way to let it all be holy
Liberation is at the nucleus of every page of Sanah Ahsan’s rousing debut I cannot be good until you say it. Liberation of families within the gears of capitalism: “Fifteen shifts my mother worked Saturdays so I could bend / my wrists at different angles / over a second-hand violin.” Liberation of faith from the small minds of those who claim Islam but ignore the expansiveness of its deen: “Some need Hell to be muslim— / conjure their own religion / name it / Islam.” And always, liberation of ancestors, beyond time and empire: “we give / our lineage of pain a megaphone.” Ahsan is doing liberation work, offering readers a prayer, a song, a hand to hold amidst the amidst
I cannot be good until you say it exudes rawness, honesty and radical compassion. Each poem sits between prayer and incantation ... via the erotic, the religious and the therapist’s gaze. The lyricism of the poems merits reading and re-reading for sheer pleasure. At the heart of Sanah’s poetry is a consolidation of faith, queerness and justice. Quranic verse does not simply punctuate the work, but breathes through it. This is a remarkable and transformative collection
Sanah Ahsan’s polyphonous debut pivots around tensions of psychological drama, together with an induced sense of yearning. I’ve long admired her ability to lean into complex aspects of modernity, tradition, pop culture and faith by pinballing from formal verse to the more freewheeling, experimental modes of poetry ... Here, she’s attuned a lens capable of focusing on the micro and the macro simultaneously ... what an artful and inspired set of poems
A heart punching debut collection ... like the poems of Ntozake Shange and Fatimah Asghar.. the sounds of “lonely prayers”, Quranic verse and meditation create a lyrical soundtrack dedicated to the goodness and the shadows of men, mothers and the “othered”
Sanah Ahsan's debut is alive with a want and restlessness that remakes the "You" of desire – and faith – again and again
A daring debut collection from Sanah Ahsan. We are guided through the complexities of just being. Whether relating to family, religion or sexuality, we are held in hope ... these poems speak to a part of our everyday lives
