“The Afterlife of Sweetness is a transfixing collection whose layers gracefully unfurl through poems that fearlessly process the physical and psychological dilemmas of existence and mortality. In her adept portrayal of many contrasting subjects, settings, beauties, and griefs, Bashir creates a nuanced and fresh mode of encountering the world with all its dangers and raptures. The poems in this book are vivid, wise, intimate, and original.” —Marcus Jackson
Jaia Hamid Bashir’s debut collection, The Afterlife of Sweetness, searches for beauty in waste and for mercy in defiance of a Muslim American girlhood. Haunted by lost lovers, Islamic theology, Hindu and Greek epics, and fractured selves, these poems trace the erotic contours of belief and the hungers that shape our becoming. They move among abandoned mining towns, gas stations, Qur’anic caves, suburbia, the American West, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art— braiding myth with memory and eros with rot to dissect what remains after the beloved has vanished. Dogs, oysters, deer, goats, and maggots appear as traveling companions; neon signs hum beside Lorca, Celan, and the Mahabharata. Throughout these journeys, Bashir exhorts us to confront sites of both the profane and the sacred and asks: How do we endure love, dissipation, and time? Recalling the work of Kaveh Akbar, Frank Stanford, Rumi, and Jorie Graham, The Afterlife of Sweetness is both pilgrimage and detour, never veering from its insistence that holiness is not elsewhere but here.
Jaia Hamid Bashir was born to South Asian immigrant artists. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Narrative, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She has received numerous prize recognitions, including winning the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Desire/Halves. The Afterlife of Sweetness is her debut full-length collection.
Contents
I. Sacred Rot
Stringing the Bow
Maggotville
Marrow of Mercy
Good Girl
The Strangers
The Waiters
The Brute
On Hunger
On Greek Origins
Self-Portrait of a Face That Isn’t Mine
The Cavesleepers
Then, the Cave
Girlhood Rules Against Dating as Villanelle
The Divine Dyslexia
The Zikr Room
Girlish
In the Throats of Wild Things
Lucky Rabbit’s Foot
II. Brine
In Dead Horse Point, We Are Alone
The Eyeball Halves
Con la Serpiente I
Aleph from What Was Once a Homeland
One Red Thread
Brief Conversations with a Little Moon
How to Make an Ariel
Brine
Toward Tenderness, a Knife
And the Word for Moonlight Is My Name
Con la Serpiente II
Still, Life with Fruit
Pegasus Tattoo on the Left
¡Viviendo Así!
III. Fanaa or Unparadise
The Shadow Self
Vultures, Then
The Last of Us in the Wild
The Mouths
The Appalachian Trail
The Teeth Lottery
Nocturna
On Lightness
The Contest
The Flood and the Ark
The Dive
Haptics of Blue
Aubade in Another Universe
The Neighbors
The Passenger
