Lightness of diction contrasts world’s grief

In the first section of her second collection, Lantern (Anansi, 112 pages, $23), Kashmiri-Canadian writer Sanna Wani articulates a familial and poetic lineage as well as the poetic theory that underpins the collection: “Like this tree,” she writes in A Happy Poet, “I am not interested in poetry that does not help me live. I take a picture of the light and I carry it — it carries me — home.”

Light suffuses the collection through the images as well as through Wani’s way with diction, whereby the lines land delicately on the ear and on the mind. This lightness is in a subtle tension with Wani’s focus on labour and the gravity of the griefs of living in the world. In A Poem’s Poet, Wani begins by considering the word “heft,” and the way it sits uneasily notwithstanding its persistence. The poem turns on the question “What have I been lifting? It shifts. It becomes hearth.” From there the speaker proceeds to chart a path to herself.

The labour of poetry is never more at the fore than when the question of what poetry can do comes up against genuine need for action. In Lullaby for Gaza, Wani opens: “The whole world mourns. The weeping willow.”

From these opening images, the speaker asks what the purpose of grief, the responsibility of poetry, are in relation to catastrophes of all sorts: humanitarian, climate, family. This poem nearly breaks under the tension between “Sometimes, in front of reality,/ art disgusts me” and “My job is to tell you about the light,/ dappled on the surface of the lake like a thousand sapphires.”

It’s a testament to Wani’s skill that it doesn’t, and that the poem’s closing image, “the wind/ running its fingers through the willow’s hair, like God’s hand —/ like a mother, somewhere out there, soothing her child to sleep,” doesn’t wholly soothe.

Sanna Wani launches Lantern at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location on Thursday, Oct. 22 at 7 p.m.

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“(E)rasure is an archeological device, excavating and amplifying human voices and experiences from the formal and verbal conventions of a legal document,” writes Feisal G. Mohamed in the essay that opens his book-length erasure poem, Nowhere is Safe in Gaza (Brick Books, 200 pages, $25).

As this essay makes clear, to oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza neither denies the Holocaust, nor does it imply endorsement of Hamas’s attack on October 7th. “South Africa unequivocally condemns the targeting of Israeli and foreign national/ civilians and the taking of hostages (…)/over 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals have been killed in Israel/ including 36 children,” Mohamed writes.

South Africa is named specifically, because the source from which the poem emerges is the country’s application to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with violations of the Genocide Convention. Mohamed’s erasures, strategic repetitions and visual experiments cause the emotional impact of Israeli violence to accrue and intensify across the entirety of the book.

One of the most chilling parts of the erasure occurs in a late section of the poem. After chronicling “Genocidal Acts Committed against the Palestinian People,” Mohamed turns to a section of the petition called “Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others.” Here, the dehumanizing rhetoric is stark and devastating: “Erase the memory of/ them Erase them their families mothers children These animals can no longer live.”

Nowhere is Safe in Gaza attempts to make public sense of the “Images of mutilated and/ burned corpses billed as ‘exclusive content/ from the Gaza Strip,’” the specific images circulating in an Israeli Telegram Chanel named in the document as well as those that proliferate in public social media feeds and across the news, atrocities “both hypervisible and being actively hidden by those perpetrating, and justifying, slaughter and deprivation.”

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Poetry columnist melanie brannagan frederiksen’s first collection The Night, The Knife, The River is forthcoming in spring 2027 with At Bay Press.