The Afterlife of Sweetness: Poems (The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize)

The Afterlife of Sweetness: Poems (The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize)

Jaia Hamid Bashir’s The Afterlife of Sweetness searches for beauty in waste and for mercy in defiance of a Muslim American girlhood. Haunted by lost lovers, Islamic theology, Hindu and Greek epics, and fractured selves, these poems trace the erotic contours of belief and the hungers that shape our becoming. They move among abandoned mining towns, gas stations, Qur’anic caves, suburbia, the American West, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art― braiding myth with memory and eros with rot to dissect what remains after the beloved has vanished. Dogs, oysters, deer, goats, and maggots appear as traveling companions; neon signs hum beside Lorca, Celan, and the Mahabharata . Throughout, Bashir exhorts us to confront sites of both the profane and the sacred and asks: How do we endure love, dissipation, and time? Recalling the work of Kaveh Akbar, Frank Stanford, and Rumi, and Jorie Graham, The Afterlife of Sweetness is both pilgrimage and detour, never veering from its insistence that holiness is not elsewhere but here. “Jaia Hamid Bashir risks her own vision of the world, meaning she risks idiosyncrasy and bewilderment. That she so often attains the unity of the realized poem―a difficult thing, an elusive thing―is a testament to her gifts. In The Afterlife of Sweetness , she doesn't waste those gifts on the easy comforts of the facile. When these poems are beautiful, it is because they are true. The Afterlife of Sweetness is exactly what a first book should be: It is a next step, for the poet and also for poetry.” ―Shane McCrae “The vision of The Afterlife of Sweetness has everything to do with poetic faith. ‘Let me pretend / I believe in something,’ Jaia Hamid Bashir can say coyly; but this is a poet whose line trembles with spiritual conviction. We are made believers by the intensity of her vision, by the sharp associative movements of image, awe, and memory that populate these pages. When Bashir asks, ‘How much / is about the displaced heart?’ I hear in the preposition ‘about’ not just subject matter, but location: It is a question of what frames displacement, how dislocations make up a mind. Bashir’s work is intoxicating and unparaphraseable. The person who holds this book should prepare themselves for transport.” ―Jay Deshpande “ The Afterlife of Sweetness is a transfixing collection whose layers gracefully unfurl through poems that fearlessly process the physical and psychological dilemmas of existence and mortality. In her adept portrayal of many contrasting subjects, settings, beauties, and griefs, Bashir creates a nuanced and fresh mode of encountering the world with all its dangers and raptures. The poems in this book are vivid, wise, intimate, and original.” ―Marcus Jackson Jaia Hamid Bashir was born to South Asian immigrant artists. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received numerous prize recognitions. She is the author of the chapbook Desire/Halves. The Afterlife of Sweetness is her debut full-length collection. Good Girl ​​​​​​​ At first, harmless—an accidental lullaby stretched across the headlights of an overnight truck on an empty highway. Then, it alters. As a child,—   half alms, half alarm, I was called an angel. Yet, I remember pressing my mouth to the lips of the sexy villain on the old Panasonic, swallowing static. Then, later,   I rejected all my matches on Valentine’s Day. Engrossed by Venus at the Met. Her belly, a full moon above a graveyard. Naked cupid dangled over   like an afterthought. Then the night arrived, a song of the same old shadows. I’ve only craved words of affirmation: You are such a good girl. So, tell me   to undress, as Titian’s Venus, to wait at the window—I’ll wait for my lover who left his wife, tuning his sorrow and Spanish guitar on the edge   of my messy bed. I am a hunger artist. To devour is to destroy. I can’t fast on holy days. This interior false god feeds on meat, fat, sardines, black olives,   and all others forbidden and rotten. A parable in Islam reveals a prostitute lowered her shoe into a well for a thirsty dog. That one good deed and God’s grace fell   around her in warm rain. I just want one drop of mercy on a long stain. The rind is the rule, the reward is holding in sweetness. I eat the entire orangerie: glass and flesh.   Now even dawn withdraws its touch. If only goodness were mine to claim.