The Knot of My Tongue: Poems and Prose

For readers of Fatimah Asghar's If They Come for Us, here is a searing, multidimensional debut about the search for language and self, which is life itself.

I knew it was time to build what could carry, what could find the high point
to name what I knew to be the world and carry it with me

At the heart of The Knot of My Tongue is Zehra Naqvi's storying of language itself and the self-re-visioning that follows devastating personal rupture. Employing a variety of poetic forms, these intimate, searching poems address generations, continents, and dominions to examine loss of expression in the aftermath of collisions with powerful forces, ranging from histories to intimacies.

Naqvi follows a cast of characters from personal memory, family history, and Quranic traditions, at instances where they have either been rendered silent or found ways to attempt the inexpressible--a father struggling to speak as an immigrant in Canada; a grandmother as she loses her children and her home after the 1947 Partition; the Islamic story of Hajar, abandoned in the desert without water; the myth of Philomela who finds language even after her husband cuts off her tongue.

Brilliantly blending the personal and the communal, memory and myth, theology and tradition, the poems in this collection train our attention--slow and immediate, public and private--on our primal ability to communicate, recover, and survive. This example is striking for the power of its speaking through loss and a singular, radiant vision.

Author: Zehra Naqvi
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 03/26/2024
Pages: 96
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9780771014932

About the Author
ZEHRA NAQVI is a Karachi-born writer raised on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver, BC). She is a winner of the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers awarded by the Writers' Trust of Canada. Her poem "forgetting urdu" was the winner of Room's 2016 Poetry Contest. Zehra has written and edited for various publications internationally. She holds two MSc degrees in migration studies and social anthropology from Oxford University where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. The Knot of My Tongue is her debut poetry collection.