The Common Press is proud to host an evening with Sanah Ahsan, author of I cannot be good until you say it', on Thursday, April 11th, from 6:30 pm to 9 pm. This stunning collection intricately weaves verses from the Quran, psychology, and the hip-hop soundtrack of their childhood. Sanah's poems reach for divinity in the body, creating an archive that refuses erasure. Join us for a discussion, readings, Q&A, and signing with Sanah. The evening will be hosted by HASTI.
Innovative and deeply compassionate ... multilingual verse suffused with a vital musicality and a palpable tenderness, Ahsan calls poetry into prayer and evokes a faith safe enough to be mothered by- Mary Jean Chan
Liberation is at the nucleus of every page of Sanah Ahsan's rousing debut ... Ahsan is doing liberation work, offering readers a prayer, a song, a hand to hold amidst the amidst - Kaveh Akbar
About the book
The poems in the collection traverse unruly emotional and physical landscapes, including Whiteness, Islamophobia, homophobia, intergenerational suffering, and the politics of therapeutic processes. In these pages, belief and unbelief, goodness, and badness, the material and spiritual are intertwined, reclaiming queer love and desire as holy.
How are we incarcerated by others' gazes? Who gets to be good in a society built upon hierarchy? How might we embrace each other's madnesses? Sanah Ahsan asks questions that travel to the heart of our humanness, bending the lines between psychologist and client to show us the sacred nature of our wounds. These poems kneel to the messiness of being alive, building altars to complication and presence.
Refusing binaries of gender or religious doctrine, 'I cannot be good until you say it' finds what is to be revered in the grey spaces of morality, advancing imagination and self-compassion as sites of communion.
A remarkable and transformative collection.
-Keith Jarret
About Dr Sanah Ahsan
Sanah is winner of the Outspoken Performance Poetry Prize: a tender meditation on queerness and Islam
Sanah’s work sits in the cracks; in the sacred falling apart, centering compassion and embracing each other's madness. Their psychological practice is rooted in liberation and community psychology, drawing on therapeutics and poetics as life-affirming practices, to support racialised and marginalised people. Some of Sanah’s media work includes writing for The Guardian, delivering a TED talk, and presenting a Channel 4 documentary on the over-medicalisation of people’s distress. Sanah is working on a non-fiction book about the politics of distress, and society’s relationship with unruly emotions.
Dissolving whatever boundaries would wall us off from love, Ahsan finds a way to let it all be holy.
-Victoria Adukwei-Bulley
About HASTI
Hasti is an award-winning poet and writer, who also works at The Common Press. Hasti is an alumna of the Southbank New Poets Collective and a member of the Ledbury Poetry Critics, they are the recipient of the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry and have recently published poems in BATHMAGG, ZINDABAD ZINE, and THE WILLOWHERB REVIEW. They have also co-written the short sci-fi film DIGGING, produced by Film4. Hasti has created shows for Montez Press Radio and hosts open mic and poetry night Fresh Lip.
- Doors open at 6:30 pm
- Hot drinks and soft drinks available from the bookshop. You are welcome to bring your own alcoholic drinks.
- Discussion, Readings, Signings, and Q & A from 7 pm - 9 pm
The event will be taking place downstairs, which is sadly not wheelchair accessible.