HUM: Poems: The Backwaters Prize in Poetry
Autor Sanam Sheriffen Limba Engleză Paperback – oct 2026
The word “hum” in Urdu can mean both “we” and “I.” In English, it’s a gesture of sound—a vibration. Sanam Sheriff’s HUM is a trans call to the beauty of attempt rather than the clarity of arrival. This book seeks as the pilgrim seeks, wandering from a plural sense of self with a lyric attunement to the wound’s power.
Following a queer, trans, Muslim speaker who grew up in southern India and migrated to the United States, Sheriff’s debut collection invites us to listen: to how yearning for a country blurs with yearning for a beloved; to how exile, for queer and trans people, is where the body itself becomes a place of dignity and prayer.
Enriched by Urdu lyric traditions of love, and love mourned, HUM raises the queer erotic to the heavens, even as the grief of separation lingers as paradise lost. Here, Sheriff weaves together the two most potent threads of human life: pain and love, strummed until they sing.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496248022
ISBN-10: 1496248023
Pagini: 74
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Editura: The Backwaters Press
Colecția The Backwaters Press
Seria The Backwaters Prize in Poetry
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496248023
Pagini: 74
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Editura: The Backwaters Press
Colecția The Backwaters Press
Seria The Backwaters Prize in Poetry
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet, performer, and educator from Bangalore, India. From 2022 to 2025, they served as a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. Sheriff curates the Poets’ Studio with Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia.
Cuprins
١
Not forgetting, but choosing to.
Trans/mission
The Emperor Pats His Lips with a Napkin
I didn’t want to be touched. I wanted to be believed.
Having Left
I watch my country on a screen, I switch it off.
Ramadan Aubade
Give Me Back to God
A Queery
And to leave a thing?
Pogrom: February 24th, 2020, Delhi
voyeurism
Trans/lucency
Pogrom: February 26th, 2020, Delhi
Ramadan
The Emperor’s Understudy
Your breasts, bare, against my memory of the Taj Mahal
Body divides shame from shame of shame.
praise song
The loneliness of happiness
The Emperor’s Watch, Shining Now
Salah
O’hare International Arrivals: On the Day our Periods Sync
This country is motherless and makes me forget
٢
Lament
Daybreak
Want is a Snapping Kind of Sound
Trans/literation
Phantom Heart
Three Months Pre-Op, Inception
An Untended Distance Can Feel Like a Wilderness
Soul
Aubade
Eight Weeks Pre-Op, Walking into the Women’s Bathroom off I-95
To a Lover, Miles Away
Source
The Smallest Sea
The Shape of Things
Six Weeks Pre-Op, Another Dream
Aim
From Whence We Are
Silence, Yours, a Sudden Winter
One Week Pre-Op
The Emperor’s Shadow Falling Forward
gender affirming care
Interlude at Neighborhood Gas Station
Lover, My Country
The Only Distance is Return
Trans/figuration
In a Language Not Mine, Speak
Notes
Acknowledgements
Not forgetting, but choosing to.
Trans/mission
The Emperor Pats His Lips with a Napkin
I didn’t want to be touched. I wanted to be believed.
Having Left
I watch my country on a screen, I switch it off.
Ramadan Aubade
Give Me Back to God
A Queery
And to leave a thing?
Pogrom: February 24th, 2020, Delhi
voyeurism
Trans/lucency
Pogrom: February 26th, 2020, Delhi
Ramadan
The Emperor’s Understudy
Your breasts, bare, against my memory of the Taj Mahal
Body divides shame from shame of shame.
praise song
The loneliness of happiness
The Emperor’s Watch, Shining Now
Salah
O’hare International Arrivals: On the Day our Periods Sync
This country is motherless and makes me forget
٢
Lament
Daybreak
Want is a Snapping Kind of Sound
Trans/literation
Phantom Heart
Three Months Pre-Op, Inception
An Untended Distance Can Feel Like a Wilderness
Soul
Aubade
Eight Weeks Pre-Op, Walking into the Women’s Bathroom off I-95
To a Lover, Miles Away
Source
The Smallest Sea
The Shape of Things
Six Weeks Pre-Op, Another Dream
Aim
From Whence We Are
Silence, Yours, a Sudden Winter
One Week Pre-Op
The Emperor’s Shadow Falling Forward
gender affirming care
Interlude at Neighborhood Gas Station
Lover, My Country
The Only Distance is Return
Trans/figuration
In a Language Not Mine, Speak
Notes
Acknowledgements
Recenzii
“A reckoning painted with the colors of wounds, pleasures, dreams, and what one can find when they view the world and life with anointed honesty and wonder—HUM is proof of the transformational power of poetry in the hands of someone whose mind is kissed by the divine. Like me, you will find yourself bowing in the temple of this one-of-a-kind poet where the body—finally witnessed, loved, and transformed by that love—is ‘rising as though it is the prayer/ itself.’ This is the debut of a poet already singing with a master’s wonder.”—Danez Smith, author of Don’t Call Us Dead and Bluff
“Sanam Sheriff’s provocative, lyric contemplation of trans becoming and embodied citizenship is inlaid into poetic forms mined from traditions as old as love itself. Like malachite and turquoise flowers set into marbled Indo-Mughal tombs, the poet’s exquisitely wrought, opulent images make new life bloom from the deadest stone. With inventive music and a resoundingly South Asian attunement to the creative power of sensuous encounters, these poems recompose the zikr so that each of the ninety-nine names for God rhymes with ‘beloved.’ HUM teaches me any pilgrimage which queries what is eternal and divine must be undertaken in this disoriented, mortal body. Not since Agha Shahid Ali’s oeuvre has a book made me gaze at my countries—the United States and India—with such longing, anger, and love. A sublime, assertive, and unabashedly erotic debut.”—Divya Victor, author of Kith and Curb
“What a triumph! If language has historically been a fist closed against us, against our queer, Muslim, trans, feral, free selves, Sanam Sheriff’s HUM, in its dazzling, insistent refusal to give way, makes a new way, a new body, and the language for it: Here, the ‘Queer Gods adorn us,’ ‘I have kissed,’ Sheriff sings, ‘the fist open.’”—Carl Phillips, author of Scattered Snows, to the North
“Daring, inventive, and deeply human, HUM helped restore my faith in what imagination and language can do, even as those in power work to corrode both. This is a book I needed to read by a poet I feel fortunate to be living alongside.”—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones and You Could Make This Place Beautiful
“Sanam Sheriff’s provocative, lyric contemplation of trans becoming and embodied citizenship is inlaid into poetic forms mined from traditions as old as love itself. Like malachite and turquoise flowers set into marbled Indo-Mughal tombs, the poet’s exquisitely wrought, opulent images make new life bloom from the deadest stone. With inventive music and a resoundingly South Asian attunement to the creative power of sensuous encounters, these poems recompose the zikr so that each of the ninety-nine names for God rhymes with ‘beloved.’ HUM teaches me any pilgrimage which queries what is eternal and divine must be undertaken in this disoriented, mortal body. Not since Agha Shahid Ali’s oeuvre has a book made me gaze at my countries—the United States and India—with such longing, anger, and love. A sublime, assertive, and unabashedly erotic debut.”—Divya Victor, author of Kith and Curb
“What a triumph! If language has historically been a fist closed against us, against our queer, Muslim, trans, feral, free selves, Sanam Sheriff’s HUM, in its dazzling, insistent refusal to give way, makes a new way, a new body, and the language for it: Here, the ‘Queer Gods adorn us,’ ‘I have kissed,’ Sheriff sings, ‘the fist open.’”—Carl Phillips, author of Scattered Snows, to the North
“Daring, inventive, and deeply human, HUM helped restore my faith in what imagination and language can do, even as those in power work to corrode both. This is a book I needed to read by a poet I feel fortunate to be living alongside.”—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones and You Could Make This Place Beautiful
Descriere
HUM is a trans call to the beauty of attempt rather than the clarity of arrival. This book seeks as the pilgrim seeks, wandering from a plural sense of self with a lyric attunement to the wound’s power.