Grasping at This Planet Just to Believe

Tanzila Ahmed says of her first full-length poetry collection, Grasping at This Planet Just to Believe: "Every Ramadan since my mother's passing, I've written daily poems as a practice of prayer during the month of Ramadan. Daily poems, over one lunar month over ten years. 2,800 poems, if I had actually done it without fail. Some years were more successful than others, depending on the year, the season, the heart, the world politics, the grief. Some years, all I did was write two poems and then fall into a depth of nothingness. "This project has become one of the most spiritually fulfilling part of how I connect to the world during Ramadan. I hope these poems can support you on your journey as well."

About the Author :
Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed is a political strategist, storyteller, and artist based in Los Angeles. She creates at the intersection of counternarratives and culture-shifting as a South Asian American Muslim 2nd-gen woman. She's turned out over 500,000 Asian American voters, recorded five years of the award winning #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast and makes #MuslimVDay cards annually. Her essays are published in the anthologies, New Moons, Pretty Bitches, Whiter, Good Girls Marry Doctors, Love Inshallah, and in numerous online publications. She has published two poetry collections Emdash and Ellipses (2016) & The Day The Moon Split in Two (2020), is featured in Tia Chucha's Coiled Serpent (2016) and her poetry has been commissioned by the Center for Cultural Power, PolicyLink, the Garment Worker Center, KPCC's Unheard LA, and more. A protest sign she designed for the 2017 Women's March sits in the permanent archives of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Review :
"In this collection, believers chase the Almighty, children grieve their parents, and lovers recall their beloveds, and the artist reminds the reader (in imagery that is fresh and optimistic and joyous) that it is not in reunion where fulfillment is found, but in the transformations that we experience along the way. A punk rock poet's sweet embrace of the spiritual practices of the ancestors." - Ali Eteraz, author of Native Believer and Children of Dust "Tanzila Ahmed writes at the intersections of spirituality, grief, community, and ritual-inspired by the many moons and phases of Ramadan. With this collection, Ahmed invites us into her singular experience-seeped in LA sunsets and Spring wildflowers, Eid wishes and midnight contemplations about what it means to be a Muslim woman, artist and activist in these harrowing times." - Neelanjana Banerjee, Kaya Press "Tanzila Ahmed's Grasping at This Planet Just to Believe enacts a poetic attention which she invites to change her. It's work I'm deeply grateful for, and I feel changed. Changed by poems that witness and resist, by a revelatory poet who offers talisman and prayer, storytelling, wholiness, and love: outward and inward. Through difficulties and violence, with received and made traditions, she holds the names of her beloveds, in all their forms, with a poet's defiant and yearning faith. Read this book, let Ahmed equip you 'with enough love and fire to face this grief filled unjust world as fighters and with bravado. Ameen.'" - Hari Alluri, author of The Flayed City "In Grasping at This Planet Just to Believe, Tanzila Ahmed's inspired and inspiring new collection, the speaker declares, "In my truth, / faith / is sung / with love." It's this love that gives these poems so much power, beauty, tenderness, bite, and luminosity. To be Muslim in America, Ahmed reminds us, is in itself a daily practice of defiance and vigilance, of self-discovery and self-love, especially when one is Brown, a woman, and an activist. To survive and thrive, one must be in solidarity with others, and these poems-all composed during ten years of Poem-a-Day for Ramadan, an inclusive, multifaith online community which Ahmed founded-speak to just how effectively poetry can help us bear witness to one another's struggles related to illness, grief, and victimization, as well as to our collective triumphs, joys, and healing journeys. This book shows us how "Ramadan is about empathy, and giving, and the humanity of all," and invites readers to share in its generous energy too." - Faisal Mohyuddin, author of Elsewhere: An Elegy