HUM

Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet, performer, and educator from Bangalore, India. From 2022 to 2025, they served as a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. Sheriff curates the Poets' Studio with Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia.

• ١Not forgetting, but choosing to.Trans/missionThe Emperor Pats His Lips with a NapkinI didn't want to be touched. I wanted to be believed.Having LeftI watch my country on a screen, I switch it off.Ramadan AubadeGive Me Back to GodA QueeryAnd to leave a thing?Pogrom: February 24th, 2020, DelhivoyeurismTrans/lucencyPogrom: February 26th, 2020, DelhiRamadanThe Emperor's UnderstudyYour breasts, bare, against my memory of the Taj MahalBody divides shame from shame of shame.praise songThe loneliness of happinessThe Emperor's Watch, Shining NowSalahO'hare International Arrivals: On the Day our Periods SyncThis country is motherless and makes me forget٢LamentDaybreakWant is a Snapping Kind of SoundTrans/literationPhantom HeartThree Months Pre-Op, InceptionAn Untended Distance Can Feel Like a WildernessSoulAubadeEight Weeks Pre-Op, Walking into the Women's Bathroom off I-95To a Lover, Miles AwaySourceThe Smallest SeaThe Shape of ThingsSix Weeks Pre-Op, Another DreamAimFrom Whence We AreSilence, Yours, a Sudden WinterOne Week Pre-OpThe Emperor's Shadow Falling Forwardgender affirming careInterlude at Neighborhood Gas StationLover, My CountryThe Only Distance is ReturnTrans/figurationIn a Language Not Mine, SpeakNotesAcknowledgements

"A reckoning painted with the colors of wounds, pleasures, dreams, and what one can find when they view the world and life with anointed honesty and wonder—HUM is proof of the transformational power of poetry in the hands of someone whose mind is kissed by the divine. Like me, you will find yourself bowing in the temple of this one-of-a-kind poet where the body—finally witnessed, loved, and transformed by that love—is 'rising as though it is the prayer / itself.' This is the debut of a poet already singing with a master's wonder."—Danez Smith, author of Don't Call Us Dead and Bluff"Sanam Sheriff's provocative, lyric contemplation of trans becoming and embodied citizenship is inlaid into poetic forms mined from traditions as old as love itself. Like malachite and turquoise flowers set into marbled Indo-Mughal tombs, the poet's exquisitely wrought, opulent images make new life bloom from the deadest stone. With inventive music and a resoundingly South Asian attunement to the creative power of sensuous encounters, these poems recompose the zikr so that each of the ninety-nine names for God rhymes with 'beloved.' HUM teaches me any pilgrimage which queries what is eternal and divine must be undertaken in this disoriented, mortal body. Not since Agha Shahid Ali's oeuvre has a book made me gaze at my countries—the United States and India—with such longing, anger, and love. A sublime, assertive, and unabashedly erotic debut."—Divya Victor, author of Kith and Curb"What a triumph! If language has historically been a fist closed against us, against our queer, Muslim, trans, feral, free selves, Sanam Sheriff's HUM, in its dazzling, insistent refusal to give way, makes a new way, a new body, and the language for it: Here, the 'Queer Gods adorn us,' 'I have kissed,' Sheriff sings, 'the fist open.'"—Carl Phillips, author of Scattered Snows, to the North"Daring, inventive, and deeply human, HUM helped restore my faith in what imagination and language can do, even as those in power work to corrode both. This is a book I needed to read by a poet I feel fortunate to be living alongside."—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones and You Could Make This Place Beautiful