{"product_id":"the-knot-of-my-tongue-isbn-9780771014932","title":"The Knot of My Tongue","description":"\u003cb\u003eFor readers of Fatimah Asghar’s \u003ci\u003eIf They Come for Us\u003c\/i\u003e, here is a searing, multidimensional debut about the search for language and self, which is life itself.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eI knew it was time to build what could carry, what could find the high point \u003cbr\u003eto name what I knew to be the world and carry it with me\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the heart of \u003ci\u003eThe Knot of My Tongue\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNaqvi 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.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBrilliantly 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.\u003cb\u003eDorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Finalist\u003cbr\u003eGeorge Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature, Shortlist\u003cbr\u003ePat Lowther Memorial Award, Shortlist\u003cbr\u003eRaymond Souster Award, Shortlist\u003cbr\u003eGerald Lampert Memorial Award, Longlist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eThe Knot of My Tongue \u003c\/i\u003eand Zehra Naqvi\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e “Zehra Naqvi’s \u003ci\u003eThe Knot of My Tongue \u003c\/i\u003erecalls and rebirths the forgotten and the unspoken. From ancestral bloodlettings to the slow, grim furl of brothers becoming men against an ongoing backdrop of tyranny and violence on repeat, Naqvi thread the ancient with the present, the estoric with the primal, filling longstanding silences surrounding familiar women with perplexed paths and intricate, immediate personhood. \u003ci\u003eThe Knot of My Tongue\u003c\/i\u003e is a fresh, adroit testimony both to memory itself and to the brave, crucial and urgently necessary act of remembering, its enduring promise of connection across exile, loss and the many faces of solitude.” —2025 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Shortlist Jury\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Knot of My Tongue\u003c\/i\u003e is a feast after the fast, a nourishing debut that floods love and remembrance and identity into every waiting crack and hollow. Naqvi’s poems are generational prayers and stories uttered with a clarity and tenderness that invite her readers to fulfill, instead, the elevated role of witnessing. This collection is an intimate, incisive, and deservedly self-assured gift of voice and story.” —2025 Raymond Souster Award Jury\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] beautiful, no-holds-barred first collection. 'The Knot' skillfully threads stories from family, Quranic traditions, myth, the 1947 Partition, and struggles as immigrants in a new country, among other things, to explore violence and horrors both historic and personal, the strength of family and female connections, and self-discovery, on and off the page. These poems are made of survival, moving forward, all the while ensuring nothing is ‘unwitnessed, nothing forgotten.’” —\u003ci\u003eToronto Star\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Naqvi’s work seamlessly blends the personal and the communal, memory and myth, theology, and tradition. Through an exploration of language and loss, this book offers insights into the power inherent in speaking through adversity, presenting a singular vision that is compelling in its emotional resonance.” —BC Bookworld\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Propulsive.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Winnipeg Free Press \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In Zehra Naqvi’s \u003ci\u003eThe Knot of My Tongue, \u003c\/i\u003ethe titular reference to Musa’s prayer to be understood, Musa’s prayer for witness, animates these poems, reiterates the prayer, and meets it with action. Silence and storytelling form a lush tapestry, a tender and rigorous interrogation, tightly knotted in the long history of women, beginning here in these poems to unknot.” —Safia Elhillo, author of \u003ci\u003eGirls That Never Die\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Zehra Naqvi knows the \u003ci\u003epoetry of rain\u003c\/i\u003e. Remembering \u003ci\u003ebarish\u003c\/i\u003e, for baba, the poet has walked continents away, still singing the intimacies and mythologies of family and home. After the storm, out beyond moments and rooms, Naqvi determines the form, reads her own body, and carries the day with this shining debut—elegant and unforgettable.” —Cecily Nicholson, author of \u003ci\u003eHarrowings\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“‘Here in the after \/ how do I give myself form?’ Zehra Naqvi’s debut book of poems is a steady reckoning with inheritance: a contention of private pain against rituals of collective mourning that venerate female prophetic voices of witness from Hajar to Zainab. \u003ci\u003eThe Knot of My Tongue \u003c\/i\u003emoves through forms of pilgrimage both embodied (as the Arba’in walk from Najaf to Karbala) and as an introspective reclamation of the will, the splendid emergence of the poetic self.” —Rahat Kurd, author of \u003ci\u003eCosmophilia\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s clear to me that Zehra Naqvi’s long-awaited debut is a future classic. \u003ci\u003eThe Knot of My Tongue \u003c\/i\u003eweaves matriarchal elegy and triumph into an absolutely riveting, multilingual devotion that echoes long after the last page. This is a text I will return to and learn from again and again.” —Leah Horlick, author of \u003ci\u003eMoldovan Hotel \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In the tradition of the many great poet-revolutionaries, Naqvi deploys lan­guage like a tool: as a call to action, testament against injustice, and container for ancestral memories. More than that, however, she guides us, expertly and with great vulnerability, through the spaces between words towards those truths that are only found beyond the pale of language.” —Irfan Ali, author of \u003ci\u003eAccretion\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eZEHRA NAQVI \u003c\/b\u003eis 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 \u003ci\u003eRoom’s\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003ci\u003eThe Knot of My Tongue \u003c\/i\u003eis her debut poetry collection.Hajar\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was not thirst that drove me to scramble in the desert\u003cbr\u003e     from one hill to the other like a mad pendulum\u003cbr\u003eit was not thirst, not the child crying in the burning sand\u003cbr\u003e     nor my husband’s disappearing footsteps\u003cbr\u003eit was that wide, empty horizon that promised no salvation\u003cbr\u003e     all language lost, the sun uninhibited\u003cbr\u003eit was madness, it was reaching the end of the world and needing\u003cbr\u003e     to hear my feet against the ground, my breath ragged\u003cbr\u003emy heart thundering against the silence of the barren earth\u003cbr\u003e     I was not looking for water, I wanted evidence of my own life","brand":"McClelland \u0026 Stewart","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303825395941,"sku":"NP9780771014932","price":18.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780771014932.jpg?v=1767740078","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-knot-of-my-tongue-isbn-9780771014932","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}