My Grief, the Sun

by Sanna Wani

Overview

Winner, 2023 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

Finalist, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
The highly anticipated debut collection from acclaimed poet Sanna Wani.

In Sanna Wani’s poems, each verse is ode and elegy. The body is the page, time is a friend, and every voice, a soul. Sharply political and frequently magical, these often-intimate poems reach for everything from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 film Princess Mononoke to German Orientalist scholarship on early Islam. From concrete to confessional, exegesis to erasure, the Missinnihe river in Canada to the Zabarwan mountains in Kashmir, My Grief, the Sun undoes genre, listens carefully to the planet’s breathing, addresses an endless and ineffable you, and promises enough joy and sorrow to keep growing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487010843
Publisher:	House of Anansi Press
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

SANNA WANI loves daisies. Her work has appeared in Brick, Poem-A-Day (poets.org), and Best Canadian Poetry 2020. She lives in Mississauga, Ontario, and Srinagar, Kashmir. This is her first collection of poetry.

Table of Contents

I.

Dorsal 3

Masha'Allah 5

Today and Every Day, Without You 6

Memory Is Sleeping 8

Bilabial 9

How Many Languages Make a Tongue? 11

Tragedy 12

Schizotheism 13

Princess Mononoke (1997)

I Ashitaka and the Forest Spirit 15

II San and Mora 16

III Yakul and Ashitaka 17

Meditation 18

Between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice, Tonight 20

Pendulum 21

Sing 22

II Forming Glory

Relief 25

Morphology

I would rather like to go back again / Dome of Rock 28

A footprint is shown / Two ascensions 29

Spirit is not inheritance / Exegesis then 30

Testimony / Discipline was proud 31

Start talking about God's form then / But how does God look in His most beautiful form? 32

Theologians are weavers / All of this is exegesis 33

Doxology

Where is the key for our understanding? / We look in vain for any hint of God's footprint 36

God is the Exalted and Absolute Other / Transcendence may look etiolated 37

Creation / Speculation 38

Do not believe in God / God as a radiant body 39

What does God think of beauty? / Hunger and materiality 40

Enthusiasm finds parallels / Parallel is alone at the end of the line 41

III.

Reaching 45

My Grief, the Sun 47

Who Is the Sun, Asking for Sleep? 49

Good Morning, the Sun in October 50

Grayfish Watch the Moon Fall 51

I Am Off to Meet the Himalayas 53

A Rose Is a Mouth with No Teeth 55

We Don't Want to Love People So Different from Us 56

The Very Slow Steps Toward You 57

I Am Listening to the Doves Coo 58

We Are Whispering in the Dark 59

Why I Pray 60

Your Departure, a Loneliness 62

I Remember an Incident Where My Mother Begs Me 64

Children Cackle like a Band of Hyenas 66

Asifa 67

Mind's Eye 69

IV Distances

Direction 73

Winter

Tomorrow is a place 78

Each step, a hope 79

A place I call my hands 80

Here is the world 81

Spring

Sorrow is a promise 84

My worry, a callous 85

My anger was made 86

There is only so much 87

Summer

Joy is a promise 90

That moth, breathing 91

There is a wish 92

There is still someone 93

Fall

Even the wood whispers 96

Another word for this place 97

A lilac, or lily 98

I follow a song 99

Notes 101

Acknowledgements 105

Editorial Reviews

Slipping gracefully between subjects as disparate as pop culture and theology, while maintaining her recognizably disarming mix of poignancy and sweetness, Wani’s formal approaches in My Grief, the Sun are … hard to look away from, with surprise after surprise appearing on each successive page.

CAROUSEL

In My Grief, the Sun, Sanna Wani unlocks a door for her readers, invites them to be open-hearted—to be vulnerable and curious—meditating on the ways in which love, longing, grief, distance, and faith can live together inside a person’s body and soul.

Herizons

Mapping us through time, space, and geography, Sanna Wani’s debut collection My Grief, the Sun spins a web of various griefs and loves. As visual as it is lyrical, Wani announces herself as a poet who pushes the experimentation of form forward, taking bold risks and literally reinventing the way that we see language. ‘A mosque is always directed toward Mecca. A dome does not have orientation unless it is toward the sky,’ Wani writes, and pointing her eyes to the sky, and with incredible vision, makes even the tiniest detail visible.

Fatimah Asghar

Wani has put her entire self—all her grief, all her unexpressed love, and poured it into this white and yellow bound gift for those of us who need it the most—the grief-stricken, filled to the brim with endless love.

Porter House Review

Beautiful and fresh ... this is a collection that finds delight in life, and its delight is contagious in the best way.

The Miramichi Reader

Sanna Wani’s My Grief, the Sun makes such a convincing case for astonishment as a way of life. Each poem enveloped me with so much tenderness it was as if I were the sun! The theological music that courses throughout the book was not a narrowing toward some esoteric knowledge but rather an opening toward a collective sense of enmeshment with the inscrutable world. This book is a necessary reminder that ‘there is something inside / [us] that says live.’ My Grief, the Sun is a wonder and a delight.

Billy-Ray Belcourt

I read Sanna Wani’s My Grief, the Sun with a highlighter in my hand, and by the time I was done, it was nearly out of ink. I could not stop loving lines, wanting to be sure I remembered them always. They progress with such sureness into marvelous and unexpected directions: ‘God climbs so many trees. Religion is a ladder. We are meant to help Him down.’ Over and over, Wani practices the act of artful surrender to each poem’s strange, budding logic. That she can do so with such apparent ease is astonishing. That we get to witness the places her gorgeous poems take her is a profound gift. I’m wonderstruck.

Heather Christle