Description:
In Saba Husain's Elegy for My Tongue, the everyday is always in conversation with the enormous-with the complexities of immigration, national identity, mortality, language and faith.
Brief description: Saba Husain is a Pakistani-born American poet. Her poems can be found in literary journals, including Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Third Coast, and On the Seawall. Her awards include first place in the 2022 Spring Equinox Hot Poet Poetry Contest, the 2020 Editor's Choice Award from Lamar University Press and the Center for History and Culture, and the 2014 Lorene Pouncey Award at the Houston Poetry Fest. She holds a day job and has served on the board of Mutabilis Press since 2019. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Elegy for My Tongue is her first full-length poetry collection.
Review Quotes:
Saba Husain's deft, dexterous new book of poems, Elegy for My Tongue, glides across a vast landscape where the past, present, and future dwell side-by-side. Like family photographs hanging on a wall-though taken years apart, we experience them all at once. In myriad forms and often deceptively simple statements, she explores lived, collective, and thwarted memories in compressed language that changes direction like a flock of starlings. I was especially knocked out by her sweeping range of diction-from the classic and formal to the familial and colloquial.
- Jennifer Knox, Crushing It
From Lahore to Texas, tradition to adaptation, and memory to discernment, Saba Husain's poetry celebrates the persistence of one's spirit in a world of turmoil and harshness. From the legacy of grandparents to the wondering of grandchildren, the poet gives us an entire world, exquisitely rendered with humility, precision, and artfulness.
-Ron Slate, Joy Ride