Qaf’s People

“If there is a mother country and a father country / if an ocean, or some seas, or river after river after river / breathe between your right side and your left / you’re from Qaf,” offers Governor General Award-winning writer Sadiqa de Meijer in, Qaf’s People, an elegant and ambitious exploration of mixed-race identity, diaspora, and the precarities of belonging, set in an imagined landscape drawn from Islamic mythology. Here, “a seedling body wearing a smock or backwards old // dress shirt makes a map.” Here, the Netherlands, Kenya, and Canada overlap, and “we love where we are from without a flag.” Within de Meijer’s skillful poems, history’s many tributaries converge, their confluence offering new ways of understanding the complexities of lives lived across and through continents, languages, and cultures. Qaf’s People is a book rich with inquisitive beauty and interrogative poise.

REVIEWS

“Hardly a mirage, Qaf’s People is fully realized, and there so many wonderful images and turns of phrase I will be carrying with me throughout my week. An extraordinarily well-crafted poetic collection!” -Chris Banks, The Woodlot

“These poems are beautiful and surprising. They are deeply personal … The boldness and inventiveness are remarkable” –Reading and Walking

“The book is boldly cosmological, and her imagery possesses a verdant turbulence, a poetry of provisional transcendence, one in which beauty arises from within continual change and refraction. De Meijer’s poetry repeatedly achieves this strange expansiveness: her lines hold together the catastrophic and the ordinary without flattening either.” -Paisley Conrad, Montreal Review of Books

“In Qaf’s People, de Meijer achieves a Promethean feat where Qaf is not a place lost to myth but a way to be. The collection is truly generous in this regard, but spacious, sharp, and witty too.” -Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Quill and Quire