My Grief, the Sun

Wani has put her entire self—all her grief, all her unexpressed love, and poured it into this white and yellow bound gift for those of us who need it the most—the grief-stricken, filled to the brim with endless love.

Beautiful and fresh ... this is a collection that finds delight in life, and its delight is contagious in the best way.

Sanna Wani’s My Grief, the Sun makes such a convincing case for astonishment as a way of life. Each poem enveloped me with so much tenderness it was as if I were the sun! The theological music that courses throughout the book was not a narrowing toward some esoteric knowledge but rather an opening toward a collective sense of enmeshment with the inscrutable world. This book is a necessary reminder that ‘there is something inside / [us] that says live.’ My Grief, the Sun is a wonder and a delight.

Mapping us through time, space, and geography, Sanna Wani’s debut collection My Grief, the Sun spins a web of various griefs and loves. As visual as it is lyrical, Wani announces herself as a poet who pushes the experimentation of form forward, taking bold risks and literally reinventing the way that we see language. ‘A mosque is always directed toward Mecca. A dome does not have orientation unless it is toward the sky,’ Wani writes, and pointing her eyes to the sky, and with incredible vision, makes even the tiniest detail visible.

I read Sanna Wani’s My Grief, the Sun with a highlighter in my hand, and by the time I was done, it was nearly out of ink. I could not stop loving lines, wanting to be sure I remembered them always. They progress with such sureness into marvelous and unexpected directions: ‘God climbs so many trees. Religion is a ladder. We are meant to help Him down.’ Over and over, Wani practices the act of artful surrender to each poem’s strange, budding logic. That she can do so with such apparent ease is astonishing. That we get to witness the places her gorgeous poems take her is a profound gift. I’m wonderstruck.

Slipping gracefully between subjects as disparate as pop culture and theology, while maintaining her recognizably disarming mix of poignancy and sweetness, Wani’s formal approaches in My Grief, the Sun are … hard to look away from, with surprise after surprise appearing on each successive page.

In My Grief, the Sun, Sanna Wani unlocks a door for her readers, invites them to be open-hearted—to be vulnerable and curious—meditating on the ways in which love, longing, grief, distance, and faith can live together inside a person’s body and soul.