Learn how your comment data is processed. This is something I’d like to change going forward! If only they can all be as good as this one was. Reading this story also made me reflect that I can probably count on two hands the number of stories with a Muslim MC that I’ve reviewed for this site since it started almost 3 years ago.

My heart ached for Hafsah as she tried to navigate a way forward to a life without It, but I also felt a sense of kinship with her, and I suspect many other readers will too… What “It” is in the story is not specified - it is both everything that burdens every teenager and also something unique, special, Hafsah’s alone, that no one else has. Because this is the sort of invitation where a plus one is not expected, and Hafsah doesn’t know how she’ll go on hajj without bringing It along.Įveryone says that It is just a phase, that if she ignores It, if she names It, if she grows out of It, It will go away, but nothing she’s done has ever gotten rid of It. A wonderful opportunity, a blessed opportunity, a sacred opportunity…and one she doesn’t particularly want. Hafsah has received an invitation from God, for a once in a lifetime opportunity: To go on hajj. The insights that inform this collection come to a hard-won place that is, in an early poem, identified as “You Are Here.” But here has become a more deeply owned and different place.Review of Karuna Riazi, “Plus One”, in Marieke Nijkamp, ed., Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2018): 104-131 - Purchase here. Poem by poem, the poet’s voice emerges as “individual, recognizable, distinct,” words from poet Jane Hirshfield’s essay on originality in Nine Gates. Freeman’s passionate and intelligent collection of poems, Lessons on Sleeping Alone, the movement is that of coming into the open, of claiming space. Robert King, Director of the Colorado Poets Center Freeman fearlessly probes that life that sustains life for: “Our chemical selves in all our juicy mess leave trails of truth shimmery as any snail’s.” From conception to death, from LA to the Arctic to Colorado, Freeman finds the angles to deal with subjects from Greek tragedy, an email inbox, the operating room, and, yes, sleeping alone. There is blood in these poems, and flesh as well. Jared Smith, Poetry Editor of Turtle Island Quarterly Lessons on Sleeping Alone is a beautiful, vibrant saga of a woman caught between the perfection of mythology and the loneliness of one-night business-meeting hotels.a fulfilling sequence of poems exploring the sensual awareness of the individual trying to find 'self' amidst the promise of 'kitsch and kinship.' It is filled with stark, sometimes shocking imagery that goes direct to the soul where, as Megan writes, 'metaphor is fact and symbols are simply accessories we hang around our throats.' I recommend it.

Alone by megan e freeman summary