I cannot be good until you say it by Sanah Ahsan (Bloomsbury) Karen McCarthy Woolf Published 17th October 2024

Published 17th October 2024

Learning that your mind and body have been taken hostage is one thing

Teresa Godfrey knows that it is details that bring meaning to moments and she describes them in elegant

Reading this collection is like pressing your ear to the ground to hear the orchestra of the world: alive with buzzing hum and beating wing

conjures a jazzed hybrid language to tell stories of aspiration

I cannot be good until you say it by Sanah Ahsan (Bloomsbury) Karen McCarthy Woolf Published 17th October 2024Intricately 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,