Qasida for When I Became a Woman - (New Women's Voices) by Huma Sheikh (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Qasida for When I Became a Woman is a lyrical reckoning with state violence, exile, and the intimate afterlives of loss. In these poems, a Kashmiri daughter speaks back to the killing of her father, Ghulam Nabi Sheikh, a professional musician and renowned ghazal singer of Kashmir, by Indian police and to the silence that followed: a body disappeared, a claimed cremation, a story almost erased. Moving between Kashmir and the United States, trains and subway cars, police stations and courthouses, and family homes, the collection traces how grief travels across borders and generations, and how language and music keep the dead present.

Weaving documentary detail with prayer, myth, and song, the poems explore what it means to grow into womanhood under conditions of surveillance, militarization, and inequality. The personal and political are inseparable here: a daughter's search for the truth behind her father's death opens into larger questions of occupation, belonging, and women's equality. At the same time, the book is an ode to mothers, to survival, and to the quiet but radical labor of care.

With vivid imagery and cadences shaped by ghazal and free verse, Qasida for When I Became a Woman invites readers into a landscape where memory resists erasure and poetry bears witness when official records fail. The collection has received critical attention from Kirkus Reviews and The US Review of Books.

Review Quotes

It is rare for a poet to write about war and the painful reverberations of political violence with such poise, much less with the purpose and passion displayed by Huma Sheikh. Employing the ancient Arabic form, the Qasida, Sheikh takes us to a volatile, war-torn Kashmir where her father, a well-known recording artist, was murdered, his body never identified, his death a mystery that haunts his daughter's every perception as she navigates a broken world saturated with his absence. Her voice distinctive and soulful, her vision laser focused and unflinching, Sheikh transforms an unreported tragedy into an unforgettable testament in this powerful, impressive debut.

-James Kimbrell, author of The Law of Truly Large Numbers, his most recent book

Each of these exquisite odes has the power to tear and heal your heart on the same page, even in the same line or stanza. Huma Sheikh writes with ferocious honesty about the father who was taken from her under shockingly violent circumstances, the mother who reinvented her own life to nurture the bereft child who grew to become a strong-voiced poet of our times. When she addresses her native soil, she writes, "Kashmir, you taught me to say yes ma'am, no sir, thank you," reminding us that an artist's job is to traverse this beautiful, brutal world as best she can and make art of it, make poems as entrancing as these.

-David Kirby, author of The Winter Dance Party, his most recent book

Huma Sheikh takes the long history of the Arabian Ode, which has been a palace constructed by men, and makes it her own, and in this book tells the heartbreaking story of her father's death and its aftermath. It is a story of war and death but told with such tenderness that the world is reconstructed even in the midst of "bullet storms." In these poems grenades and apples appear on the same line as do bunkers and cherries. Even in the darkest corners of her song there is a praise of the world in all its beauty and horror. How can a man just disappear? He does, but his daughter lives to make sure that no one forgets.

-Barbara Hamby, author of Holoholo, her most recent book

Kirkus Reviews:

"A powerful and moving collection that bears witness to grief, memory, and political violence with lyrical precision."

The US Review of Books:

"Sheikh's poems weave personal loss with collective history, creating work that is both intimate and politically resonant."