Poet’s Corner: Two Poems from “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets” curated by Laura Kraftowitz & Edward Salem for Poetry Magazine

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

“In the Bathroom” by Raafat Hekmat, translated by Zyad Altaghlbi, and “A Timeline of Exile” by Maryam Ala Amjadi appear in “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets,” curated by Laura Kraftowitz & Edward Salem. Read the whole folio in the July/August 2026 issue of Poetry.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: These poems are not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read them. 

A few months ago, I came across Maryam Ala Amjadi’s poem, “A Timeline of Exile,” and Raafat Hekmat’s poem, “In the Bathroom” (translated by Zyad Altaghlbi), via Poetry Magazine’s folio featuring exiled poets. As Iranian and Syrian writers, respectively, their words have a particular heft now. 

Laura Kraftowitz and Edward Salem, who curated this folio, wrote in their introduction that each of the ten contemporary poets has “faced persecution, war, or genocide, as well as threats to their safety because of their writing.” In both poems, we visit the private places that these experiences burrow into the body and soul.

The lines in “A Timeline of Exile” wind and spill as the bloodline does. That first stanza brings everything in it to a “a single trembling point”—a question mark, line break, and stanza break simultaneously. How much more could a line tremble with what it holds and holds up? Later, we face that question, at least in part: What is the difference between red versus black and white lines? The poem posits this by noting both, but doesn’t quite ask or answer it. The ‘point’ is where everything starts: The red lines are crossed, whereas the words ‘border,’ ‘black,’ and ‘white’ imply impervious binaries and blockages. A border “can’t” be transgressed without moving from one ‘state’ to the other, irreversibly in time. The vulnerability of the assured readiness, addressed to a ‘you,’ is stark and frightening, but steadfast. It trembles, but it doesn’t hesitate, which threads through Hekmat’s poem. 

“In the Bathroom” shows us the preciousness of privacy and a longing to escape surveillance. There’s desperation, too, in the employment of bits of cotton or chewing gum to plug holes. And still that trembling, reverberating from Iran to Syria. Hekmat can’t guarantee privacy in this bathroom, and even if he could, would the body believe it enough to process it as such? This is trauma: The em dash points like a sniper gun with a zoomed-in visual from somewhere he can’t distinctly identify. In other words, the threat is everywhere. 

Ovid in Exile. 9.46 x 12.50 cm oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner

This poem also tethers nakedness—literally and metaphorically—to threat. To move within the range of hatred, control, and continued colonial violence is terrifying as the reach of eyes, weapons, and surveillance only seems to expand. The poem itself seems to be fighting to move within the range of anything else, to believe that it can one day live outside the range of the sniper, shell, or nearby explosion. And by the poem’s existence alone, it both does and doesn’t.

Together, these poems consider: Can we cross any line, whether through sacrifice, bravery, or safety, that’s far enough away or a sturdy enough door? Will that crossing ever feel far or safe enough in this world? How are these questions different for Maryam Ala Amjadi, Raafat Hekmat, me, and you?

And how does reading poetry help?

The trauma always lingers, forever the remainder in war’s cruel long division. “Broken Lines,” as the folio is titled, can refer to everything from lineages/ancestry, those crossed in protest, borders crossed in escape, taboos and the perseverance of derogatory names/stereotypes, tethers to worlds/lives, bones, healthy attachments to body/place, and ultimately, the line breaks of poems as poets write through real-life enjambment.

By reading these poets, we bear witness. We see language, craft, choices, and reality. We feel the draw of hope rather than despair, and how everyone has lines to break—lines that will allow us to build something like a poem in real life. That crossing, perhaps.

In tandem, I’d love to recommend Transient Worlds (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) by the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, and Poem-a-Day’s translation-focused curation, woven together by Maya C. Popa—a dear mentor—for September. Translation, of course, is in conversation with exile, war, borders and the way language can face them. My favourite is Nikola Madzirov’s “Silence Comes Somewhere Else,” about which he writes what feels like a perfect closing to this short essay:

 “Absence is not silent. Poetry is the archaeology of unburied memories. Often, in my dreams, I see my dead mother coming home with bags full of fruit, while I run towards the apricot orchards. The scars of the unsaid appear on our faces while we sleep. My father still uses [my mother’s] old toothbrush to clean the edges of her picture frame on the gravestone and the letters of his own name engraved beside hers. This is his way of feeling more alive … like a poet trying to revise his already published poems, to create a new history.”

Poet’s Corner: “Ordinary Sugar” by Amanda Gunn

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

Amanda Gunn, “Ordinary Sugar” from Things I Didn’t Do with This Body. Copyright © 2023 by Amanda Gunn.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it. 

My first encounter with Amanda Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar” was through Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó’Tuama, not long after I read his bread recipe-poem and reflections on soup. Poems and recipes are kindred spirits, both in form and function. And, as Anthony Bourdain writes in Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, “the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency” is a vital, fundamental skill. Perhaps the same is true of poetry: We’re not all poets, but everyone can ask how they’re nourishing others with words, or learning how to absorb them for the soul. As Ó’Tuama writes:

“[R]ecipes are an old form of poetry, and I think a recipe and a poem each have a measure at the heart of them—a measure about pain, a measure about love, a measure about pleasure, or about survival. They’re giving a certain form of instruction that can turn you either towards the deliciousness of food or the deliciousness of language, that can help you look at your own life and feel like you’re finding something from it in the engagement with the writing.”

Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar,” like opening an heirloom cookbook, unfolds the complexities of the generational relationship between poem and recipe. Recipes as poems—and vice versa—are a form of ancestral archiving and memory, amplified here in the rhyme of the second stanza: keep, knees, pristine, sweet, green, pleasurably, plenty. These words summarize the ‘story’ Gunn is sharing with us; rhyme aids memory for prayer, song, patience, attention, and presence.

Remembering is also an honouring of people and their circumstances, especially through a recipe and how it’s engaged with or followed: Making sweet potato pie from russets, the gleaming glass eye, pregnant wordlessness, and fast spinning through the kitchen. There isn’t a distinct narrative arc in the poem, per se, true to the patchwork our memories often are, but Gunn includes clear, specific, detailed snapshots—not temporally bound—and brings them alongside her present-day voice’s reflections, inviting us into Grandma Mattie’s life experience and ensuing motivations. Then, the poem tethers this archiving to a bearing of witness through time—how Gunn paid attention as a child and how she’s paying attention now, through inheritance. The stanzas move from Aunts Mary & Earline → Amanda → Grandma Mattie → Amanda → Amanda’s mother → Amanda. Generational influence is layered, akin to those graham cracker cakes, yellow cakes, and the recipe book they’re making was kept safe in.

In this vein, Gunn shows not only the desire her family had to soothe what might have been a difficult life, but a witnessing of why: Hunger, poverty, starvation, and the threat of scarcity are present because they’re remembered in the body, and therefore inherited as well: “Too, the ruthless / manic canning, putting by, / putting by, against memories / too near starvation—the / machine in her belly built / to last.”

Like the inheritance of poverty or scarcity—and the accompanying shame, fear, and silence—some things aren’t documented in a recipe book. Ways of survival and being are altogether missing from our present day-to-day lives: The economic intelligence and commitment to caring for a summer garden—weeding, tilling, watering, and feeding with eggshells and coffee grounds—and harvesting it before the first frost to have enough food for winter. But we all come from oral cultures, and Gunn’s poem seems to say: Don’t forget to witness and remember what wasn’t written down—it’s as much a part of the recipe (of survival) as the ordinary sugar made extraordinarily by love.

And ultimately, though an accessible free-verse poem in five stanzas, “Ordinary Sugar,” is in fact the recipe that includes as much as Gunn can gather. Through the language of food and cooking, it alchemizes its reader and speaker: What’s inherited takes a new shape when digested, then gifted, like the bread and jam in the final stanza. As Ó’Tuama says: “[A] recipe is an opportunity in writing to give some tools for survival as well as maybe a couple of quantities.” When we follow a recipe, it’s not only those fed who survive. The person who crafted it lives on, too.

Poet’s Corner: “The First Water Is the Body” by Natalie Diaz

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

“The First Water Is the Body” by Natalie Diaz, from Postcolonial Love Poem. Copyright ©2020 by Natalie Diaz. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, in Emergence Magazine.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it. 

When I read “The First Water Is the Body” in 2020, after Natalie Diaz’s book, Postcolonial Love Poem (in which the poem appears), won the Pulitzer Prize, my consciousness felt diverted like a river around a boulder. I struggled to grasp another poem as this one settled, alive, into my body. Perhaps it didn’t settle at all, like the settler I am in Canada. The poem helped me remember the river that I, too, already am.   

At first, before reading, you may wonder: Is this a poem? The prose poem and lyric essay have much in common—often a blend of narrative and personal experience held by poetic, lyric language and juxtaposition. You might say this form is much like a river, bed, and bank—curving, compressing, and expanding. What makes it a poem, to me, is the flow: Uninhibited, and yet, tethered to a strong form: A body, if you will. It’s also a poem because Natalie Diaz says it is (can you tell I’m a fan?). 

Further, deeper into the water, the poem’s syntax, diction, and imagery lift each other. The word ‘conservative’—and the way it’s included as the last word of a section and stanza—implicates many meanings. There’s also the use of red, white, and blue—the colours of the American flag—appearing as silt, rock, sun burns, Native/white bodies, blood, and water. The body, of course, recurs, but here is my favourite example:

“If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say who I am if the river is gone?”

Like a river, most stanzas are only one sentence. The sentences, as water holds pebbles, carry images, descriptions, and declarations; muscles to the bones of the poem (of which there are many). The most visceral, I felt, is Diaz’s reckoning with translation, noting John Berger’s belief that true translation returns to the non-verbal. In this sense, what kind of translation is happening in the poem and outside of it? Who is it for? What has been lost in this process?

“In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care. You might not know we mean both. // “If I say, My river is disappearing, do I also mean, My people are disappearing?”

The body and river cannot be separated—they are one. Therefore, as Diaz writes, there’s no metaphor or juxtaposition of tears, river, blood, though these appear in the poem side-by-side. This shows us the limit of language on the page, which Diaz reflects stunningly. Poems, often, tangle with metaphor and myth—which are in close relationship. Diaz writes that “What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth.” She follows this by asking, “If the river is a ghost, am I? // Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting.” I’m reminded here of “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” a paper by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. 

Thus, the hope of the poem may be to haunt us via the feelings attributed to mythological spirits and ghosts—a sense of loss, grief, lingering, and fear—in a way that convinces: “If I could convince you, would our brown bodies and our blue rivers be more loved and less ruined?” We know that the body remembers trauma spatially. So, too, does the water. If you’re curious about Indigenous ghost/horror stories, I recommend Never Whistle At Night, expanded on here. 

Alongside Berger, Diaz brings in Toni Morrison’s quote: “All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” Other voices in the poems, alongside Diaz, work formally to help us see and feel plurality: If “We think of our bodies as being all that we are: I am my body [, t]his thinking helps us disrespect water, air, land, one another. But water is not external from our body, our self.”

Lastly, Diaz uses questions throughout the poem—something that’s tricky to get right. To a few, she responds:

“Will we remember from where we’ve come? The water.”

Others, she asks rhetorically, the answer implied:

“Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”

And some, she leaves, necessarily, for all of us:

“And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other?”

This poem is full of life, as a river is—as a body is. Please continue spending time with it beyond this brief, surely inadequate introduction. And perhaps ask: What river am I?