I cannot be good until you say so
Bloomsbury Publishing
$16.95
You can purchase a copy here.
Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider
Sanah Ahsan’s I cannot be good until you say it is as masterful as it is moving, and as inspiring as it is an exercise in reflective thinking. Presented in four parts, the collection is expertly curated. rich in emotion, and ripe of liberation that expands and extends far beyond the collection’s opening and closing pages.
The collection’s fifty poems (and LISTENING ROOM) are heartfelt and full of love– love for self, for community, and for possibility. The pieces weave tenderness and musicality with a tone as warm and as penetrating as echoes of the lives of which the poems speak. The Outspoken Performance Poetry Prize winner is gorgeous in ways that escape simple description and inspire deep admiration. The collection, and its takes on queerness, Islam, Quranic verse, family, nourishment, and more, offers lessons on how to live, question, and write with intention. Whether in community with strangers or at a table with familial and/or familiar faces, the poems breathe, in part, generational traditions, harms, and healing. The result– a buffet replete with “Ancestral recipes” in their many forms, queries of family, and questions as worthy of extended reflection as answers.
The debut collection embodies love, prayer, and spirituality through exquisite use of language and intentional use of space. The pieces are complex and layered in ways that mirror the human condition, the human body, and the politics of life and suffering. The collection takes on, in part, the body’s complexity with words that of piercing precision that also soothe like chamomile alongside wounded wombs and complex cycles of love, life, and (mis)understanding.
With an epigraph– “for the Divine in you”, the collection exists at the intersection of poetry and prayer and invokes and invites continued contemplation. The collection is a beginning rather than an end. The individual poems stand stronger together, with each simultaneously a breath of blessing and prayer, rumination and education, celebration and caution, grief and joy. Together, I cannot be good until you say it, is a gift of a gorgeous and sublime tapestry of questions fueled by curiosity and questions grounded in rich, descriptive detail.
For example, PASSPORT opens with –
“Veiled by tablecloth, my girlfriend swats
my hand, a fly on her knee. The teaspoons
are touching in public. Her grandmother
offers me a salami stick to start. Sorry I
don’t eat pork….”
and closes –
“...I reach for relief in the rainbow when her
grandmother asks do you have a British
passport? The burgundy-red stamped with
a golden crest moves more than my limp
tongue. I muster up the lion’s courage to ask
are we going somewhere?”
Reading the collection is a journey– one where time stands still, while always going somewhere, and the water, depth unknown, is welcoming and deeply moving, while also surprising. Beyond expert craft, the collection is much a story of kin, becoming, and conflict as a spiritual guide and reckoning. With themes of god and “good” revealing and repeating throughout the collection, Ahsan writes fearlessly and with a piercing insight that compels as it conspires to create both heightened awareness and a deeper understanding of what it means to love and be loved, to be liberated and to liberate, and to revel in the joy, music, and sadness of the written and spoken word and its many graces as well as offenses.
Stitched of love and yearning, the work is an exquisite and tender example of how poetry can be prayer and prayer can be blessing. The experience of reading this work is spiritual and spirited. Beyond its emotional qualities the work instructs in elements of craft and form. The collection is as varied as it is remarkable.
From powerful erasure —
See
to inventive lists and couplets (see, for example, FUGITIVE ARRANGEMENTS and PINK MURMURATIONS),
to inventive use of space (see, for example, IN THE MAN OF MIND and GREY IS PROPHETIC COMPLICATION),
and poignant photographs (see, for example, pages 11, 51, and 72), the work is a tapestry as much as a reflection of life and its complexity. The work is also a master class on how and where devotion meets daring inquiry with a result that grips as it reminds one of the extraordinary power of poetic inquiry to transform and to touch in ways simultaneously new and reminiscent of past and ongoing harms.
A delicate waltz, an electric tango, a surprising twist of hip hop – if a collection of poems could dance one’s way into the heart and soul of eternity, this work would. I end the work where I began– eager to read more and to continue to learn. Much like the cycles of ancestors and conflict that have come before, the work itself balances retrospection with introspection. I won’t forget this work, and I hope, dear reader, you enjoy the collection as much as I have.
Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.