Hum: Poems - Paperback
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Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry
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.
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.
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