Poetry anthology is a collection of sharp-edged shards

Review: Not This Tender

Author: Sarah Uheida

Publisher: Dryad Press

This poem anthology is a collection of broken pieces with sharp cutting edges.

If you try to assemble the pieces, you’ll get glimpses of a jagged image and I presume that this is the way the author intended it.

Sarah Uheida is a Libyan refugee who lives in Cape Town. A native Arabic speaker, Uheida has a Master’s in English Studies for Poetry.

Her writing prowess has earned her several accolades including the 2020 Dan Veach Prize for Young Poets and two scholarships; the Margaret McNamara Education Grant and the Miles Morland Foundation Writing scholarship in 2021.

While she’s had poems published in various journals and anthologies, this collection is her debut.

Here is a sample of one of her poems:

“A Grammar of Absence

“At first, I save a little money, keep every little scrap of sight-seeing, and every splinter from the here and now: poem and wound alike; degree, debris, dirge. I press them into crisp dictionary pages to send to you, but the waiting gets too long, not a year or two and the story goes stale and harder for us to hear. I lose most of my Arabic to the waiting. I lose the rest the moment I stop forcing myself to forget.”

And here is another:

“And I Do It Beautifully

“For every burial I miss, I sing a poem. I excavate a language of vacant words, rinse it in rosewater, press it flat and clean as the silence that splits mother from father. They drink their tea without speaking, and my heart does not break for them. They heal their crooked way, but they heal.

“Meanwhile, my words and I disfigure each other, breathless, barking. Language foams at the mouth. Behind my back, these lungs, cunning, starving, pocket a little air each time I open my mouth. I make your death about me.”