“HUM is proof of poetry’s transformational power 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.”

“HUM teaches me any pilgrimage that 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.”

“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.”

“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.”