Description:
HUM is a trans call to the beauty of attempt rather than the clarity of arrival. This book seeks as the pilgrim seeks, wandering from a plural sense of self with a lyric attunement to the wound's power.
Review Quotes:
"Sanam Sheriff's provocative, lyric contemplation of trans becoming and embodied citizenship is inlaid into poetic forms mined from traditions as old as love itself. Like malachite and turquoise flowers set into marbled Indo-Mughal tombs, the poet's exquisitely wrought, opulent images make new life bloom from the deadest stone. With inventive music and a resoundingly South Asian attunement to the creative power of sensuous encounters, these poems recompose the zikr so that each of the ninety-nine names for God rhymes with 'beloved.' HUM teaches me any pilgrimage which queries what is eternal and divine must be undertaken in this disoriented, mortal body. Not since Agha Shahid Ali's oeuvre has a book made me gaze at my countries--the United States and India--with such longing, anger, and love. A sublime, assertive, and unabashedly erotic debut."--Divya Victor, author of Kith and Curb