I cannot be good until you say it

Critics 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

  PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA

• 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

  NIKITA GILL

• 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

  MARY JEAN CHAN

• 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

  VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY

• 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

  KAVEH AKBAR

• 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

  KEITH JARRETT

• 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

  ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

• 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”

  RAYMOND ANTROBUS

• Sanah Ahsan’s debut is alive with a want and restlessness that remakes the “You” of desire – and faith – again and again

  WILL HARRIS

• 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

  YOMI SODE