Against extractive conceit—in poetry, I hone my refusal of apathy, provincialism, inferiority, and fragility. May I always tow lines attuned to old and new music.

so I sometimes think the poem is an animal showing proper simple complicated being and imagine if you could help it begin to come-to-be then that’d be astounding but mostly over here in this place I just fail at such stewardship

My poetics is very centered in the body and the various ways our experience runs through it. I consider grief, specifically the death of my mother, quite often in my work. Her loss is a thread that runs through all of my chapbooks, my album, and both of my books.

Now I apply myself to the task of a borrowed language, becoming mine, yet never mine. For whom is English an exclusive right, birthright, language entrenching a colony of values? To write, to make room with words, is to de-colonize, to lead the woman-child out of the labyrinth where she had been lost for lack of tongues.

Poems help me to distill, clarify and find meaning in life, both as a reader and as a writer. I write on themes of loss, trauma, oppression, healing, sex, love and the strangeness of existence. I love how an ugly first draft will shape shift, showing me what it wants and needs to be.

I'm an exophonic author writing poetry in two languages: one that I was born into, and the other that I migrated into. My work is a display of two languages, English and Persian, that are not semantically in conversation with each other.

I imagine my poetics is a box of curiosities: an unusual rock, a railway spike, a cat’s eye given by an older sibling, some old coins, one stamped with my birthyear. Objects I dig out every now and then, reorder, shuffle around. Here’s a few items currently in the mix. Attentiveness.

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

Poetry is where my heart goes to live; to mediate on its joys, and sorrow, to wallow in the emotion of the moment and stretch it out in long delicious sentiments to fill me, and hopefully others up.

I delve into mythology, historical texts and images to search out the thing, the predicament or worry or little obsession on which to write and often find more than I can keep up with. I hope my poems are welcoming…

The insight for me, in the years writing Ghosthawk, was that the inner field of my imagination, my mind, was continuous with the field of wildflowers and the star fields. It’s an old insight; it’s nothing special, but it had a profound impact on me nonetheless. All the world in a grain of sand stuff.

I write about Pakistani folklore, thinking about the richness of my own history and the ways it has been erased through colonization. I write about love. I love writing about love, and I love leaning into softness and vulnerability.

For me, the thrill of writing poetry is this possibility of being inspired, of looking at something or someone as if for the first time, seeing it or them without imposing myself. Jan Zwicky in her book, Wisdom and Metaphor, calls this seeing-as.

I dream new selves and alternative futures into becoming through poetry. I sing to the co-flourishing of the living. This song, in order to find its music, asks me to courageously accept past trauma before transforming the compost of the dead into a healing hymn.

Poetry to me is a genre of community. With the work we do at Rahila’s Ghost Press I have been privileged to meet so many incredible writers with their own unique voices and sense of story-telling.

Someone who does not simply tell us about something, but sits beside us in the silence that follows— breathing, alive. This is what... early, beloved poems did for me.

I write a haptic poetry in which the touch of other writing is continually felt, such that the encounter with my book is also an encounter with the books I have been reading.

When I’m not seeing the world poetically (lines arriving, images that stick, connections that surprise, a kind of spatial awareness that is outside of ourselves) then I feel flat—imbalanced. Not whole. Half alive. I don’t want the literal. I crave the figurative, always.

Aspects of my poetic work include deepening knowledge of self and home, decolonization, prairie history, environmental collapse, and the long poem.

When reading …, I enter a state of not-knowing which frees the imagination: poems come on through, then, through a kind of portal, door to a gate, unlocked—so the poems: themselves, the thing.