Don’t miss a poetry reading featuring Sanah Ahsan, winner of the Outspoken Performance Poetry Prize (6 Feb)

Jonathan Ball Publishers invites you to a poetry reading featuring I cannot be good until you say it by Sanah Ahsan.
I cannot be good until you say it is the much-anticipated debut collection by the winner of the Outspoken Performance Poetry Prize: a tender meditation on queerness and Islam.
Ahsan is a writer, liberation psychologist and educator. Their work has been awarded the Out-Spoken Performance Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the White Review Poet’s Prize and the Bridport Prize. Ahsan has also been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition and Frontier Poetry Prize.
Event details
Date: Thursday 6 February 2025
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Venue: Exclusive Books Cavendish, Cape Town
RSVP: Click here
‘Dexterous, varied, erotic, filled with rage, worships and wonder … I am electrified.’ – Pádraig Ó Tuama
About the book
Intricately weaving Quranic verse, psychology, and the hip-hop soundtrack of their childhood, Ahsan’s poems reach for divinity in the body; an archive that refuses erasure.
These poems traverse unruly emotional and physical landscapes, 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.
This debut collection is a call to prayer, fearlessly complicating what is good, and what is god.
Categories International Non-fiction
Tags Book events Book launches Cape Town I cannot be good until you say it Jonathan Ball Publishers Sanah Ahsan