Sin

SIN is a collection of poems reckoning with femininity, desire, and transgression. It moves between the poetic and narrative "I" to detail what it means to desire, to sin towards that desire, and to belong to a lineage. It mentions the Quranic women-Eve, Maryam, Hagar-to invoke a matrilineage, as well as, Medusa from the Greek myth, to understand how women exist in relation to each other, and to the speaker. SIN is an attempt at grappling with oneself, which inevitably leads towards, grappling with god.

Praise for Javeria Hasnain's SIN

Every one of Hasnain's poems is a revelation. There is an immediacy in this collection; the language dynamic yet deeply rooted in landscapes which map the sacred necessities of desire. With each poem, Hasnain peels back the self in different registers. The lyric becomes a medium for the poet's longing-for homeland, the Beloved, for the poem itself. As she writes in "Water is a Sin," Hasnain's work explores "the privilege of being a woman, / of housing a body desirable to touch." I am moved by each poem's quiet refusal to be still. The lines move as the poet's mind does-breathless and inexplicable. Hasnain is a wonder, and this is a beautiful, prismatic debut.

-J. Mae Barizo, author of tender machines

Tendered in the narratives planted throughout this book is the iconography of the body and its desires. We are not spared the disdain, the erotic, the grief, and the strains placed on language.

-Adedayo Agarau, Stegner Fellow, author of The Arrival of Rain

Javeria Hasnain's SIN is a chapbook fluent in the privilege of pleasure

and mortality. Quick-footed and capacious, this chapbook circles questions of morbidity, morality and mortality like a shark. Decadently tongue-in-cheek, luxuriously voracious and covetously intelligent, these poems stand up and join the ranks of other dark surrealists' like Alejandra Pizarnik, Sylvia Plath and Remedios Varo. Embalmed in a shadowy Islamic ennui, Hasnain has created an exegesis of sex and faith so empowering, angels might cower before it. Here we find sex as a speculative sport, "mercy [as] a howl" and sin as a fact of size. A genius in comparison with a stunning ability to move between cosmic and ordinary language, Hasnain has revealed herself to be a poet unafraid of any hungry horror, vibrant vitrol, or Dionysian damnation. Coyotes, countries and carnal desire alike flit across these pages like bats, imbued with an ancient apathy, poised to grow and loom over us in their gargantuan glory. Impeccable audacity and timeless daring. I'm in awe.

-Sanna Wani, author of My Grief, The Sun