My Grief, the Sun

In Sanna Wani’s vivid debut poetry collection, the body is the page, time is a friend and every voice, a soul.

Sharply political and frequently magical, these poems reach for everything from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 film Princess Mononoke to German Orientalist scholarship on early Islam. In these often intimate poems, every verse invokes ode and elegy. Love and grief sit side by side. My Grief, the Sun listens carefully to the world’s breathing, addresses the endless and ineffable you, and promises enough joy and sorrow to keep growing.

From concrete to confessional poem, exegesis to erasure, Canadian rivers to Kashmiri mountains, Wani undoes and complicates genre and gathers the world between the poet’s hands.