Sanna Wani
Biography
Sanna Wani is the author of My Grief, the Sun (House of Anansi, 2022). Her work has been featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2020, CBC, The Puritan, TIME among other places. She is the guest editor for Canthius Issue 10 and the 2023 Artist-in-Residence with The Seventh Wave Magazine. She loves daisies.
Poetics Statement
“Poetry asks for a particular kind of focus and attention from me. I can sit and read the back of a cereal box as my nephew chatters behind me, making a mess of his boiled egg breakfast to the tune of “Baby Shark.” I can even pull out a novel and manage. The words and the moment are placid, passable, like walking by a still lake—or muffled and sinking, like diving into its depths.
But if I tried to read poems at breakfast, I would probably become the egg. The lake would stand up and chase me down the street. I can barely stand music while reading poetry too because poetry is not still but very quiet. A room rearranging itself with every step you take. Stanza, door, sinking floors? No. In Poppy War, Chaghan says to Rin, “You think calling the gods is like summoning a dog from the yard into the house. But you can’t conceive of the dream world as a physical place. The gods are painters. Your material world is a canvas…an angle from which we can see the colors on the palette. This isn’t really a place, it’s a perspective. But you’re interpreting it as a room because your human mind can’t process anything else.”
Poetry is the dog, the god, the palette, and the room. Poetry is the brush and inside the brush, there is a smaller brush, just light enough for us to hold. In me, that light requires time. It usually takes me at least a month to read a book of poetry, if not longer. And then there’s the need to reread poems, to carry the book with me everywhere I go, to read it on the subway and in the parking lot and at the grocery store in front of the cheese until someone behind me says, Excuse me, I can’t reach the gouda. I practice the poem until I understand the where and when it requires of me.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Memory is Sleeping
Sometimes remembering refuses us. Sometimes I’m
a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.
—Billy-Ray Belcourt
In a daisy field. In a garden. In a graveyard, in the sun, its valley.
In the sound of nothing. Your mother and father, two trees
in the distance. In the distance. In the sound of the whistle,
someone banishing you again. A hand in the distance, a greeting.
In a greeting, a question. How old are you? Six? Seventeen?
In your body, aging, an immediacy. A flower, a new arm.
Eat the apple. Your lips redden. The person you were,
you are always becoming. Their breath spilling over
your neck. A breath, a shore, a whistle, a knife. Where is the wind?
In love, the wounds you tend. A wound, a door, a lake, a fence.
Whatever is perpendicular to your becoming. Time is a terrible statue.
The tide will eat its skin. To prevent heartbreak, practice disappearing.
All the eels are missing. You are an expert in missing. A mouth,
a lock, a gate, a key. Open your mouth and throw the word yet
into the river. Into the river, your face leaking glass. A face,
a flood, a crystal, a dove. Someday, you will be in love again.
The sun, a wound on your windowsill. Light falls
on your dreams. It sounds like someone knocking.
Tomorrow is a Place
for Maya
We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed and who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum but we go to a bookshop instead. We’re leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again.
I say, I’m obsessed with my grief and she says, I’m always in mourning. She
laughs and it’s an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole
room. I say, My home is an extension of my body and she says, Most days are
better with a long walk. The world moves without us—so we tend to a garden,
a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says,
Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning
them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in
the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.