I cannot be good until you say it by Sanah Ahsan (Bloomsbury) Karen McCarthy Woolf conjures a jazzed hybrid language

conjures a jazzed hybrid language to tell stories of aspiration

Learning that your mind and body have been taken hostage is one thing

’ Fourth Person Singular continues to blow open the relationship between self and world in a working through of lyric shame

Published 17th October 2024

and editor Karen McCarthy Woolf

I cannot be good until you say it by Sanah Ahsan (Bloomsbury) Karen McCarthy Woolf conjures a jazzed hybrid languageIntricately weaving Quranic verse, psychology, and the hip hop soundtrack of their childhood, Sanah's poems reach for divinity in the body; an archive that refuses erasure. These poems traverse unruly emotional and physical landscapes, Whiteness, islamophobia, homophobia, intergenerational suffering, and the politics of therapeutic processes. In these pages, belief and unbelief, goodness and badness, the material and spiritual are intertwined,