I had never read Hosein before this book, so I wasn’t really sure what I was in for. And well, I still am not sure what it was that this book has done to me, but my heart feels brutalized in the most welcome of ways.

My brother
has no time
for the heart-breakingness
of the old

and I have no place left
to put the sorrow
she hands to me.

The poems in this collection are each a culmination of the mundane pain we all feel everyday, and yet Hosein writes it such that you are introduced to it altogether anew. In Waitingwe are met with a mother awaiting her son, and the daughter forgotten save for the company she provides, and I find it so beautifully heart-wrenching. Wedding Day gave me the goosebumps at how savage it can be to ache.

There are some pieces that are more abstract than the others, and I love them too because of my love for abstract poetry, and there are some that are just so concrete and cutting that you could bleed on them.

Hosein here has written a brilliant collection that pulls at your heart and chews at its strings, only to leave you winded once you’re through with the book.