In This Distance

In This Distance examines the relationship between distance and desire, the erotic and the ecstatic, pleasure and paradise. Esther Perel, Audre Lorde and the biblical figure of Eve co-exist in this collection, offering their real and imagined insight as the speaker grapples with questions such as: do we need distance in order to maintain desire? Where is paradise? What constitutes an Eden?

“Brooke Sahni pulls off the damn near impossible with this book: elegant, precise, and piercingly aware poems about love and the erotic. A lot of poets treat these subjects as kryptonite. Those who tackle them usually fall into traps. Not here. Sahni’s brilliant exploration is unflinching and unearths a goldmine of wisdom, one as luminous as it is enthralling.”
—Hayan Charara, author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit

“Brooke Sahni’s In This Distance gathers the great branches of existence—love, family, connection; hunger, spirit, ritual; risk, betrayal, loss—into the pyre of sensuality. It’s a stirring collection of odes (and O!) to Esther Perel and Audre Lorde, two of our culture’s foremost goddess-scholars of desire, alongside 21st century love poems: Sahni’s work is intimate, pansexual, feminist, self-aware, fragmented, orgasmic. In This Distance is a carnal prayer book full of lines as beautifully wrought as bobbin lace, lines of ‘sacred tenderness’ and the blinding light of a woman surrendering to her own vast erotic power.”
—Arielle Greenberg, author of I Live in the Country & Other Dirty Poems

Before I Had the Word

Winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize Selected by Maggie Smith Finalist for the Arizona Book Awards and the New Mexico Book Awards

The poems in Before I Had the Word explore the divine within the secular, mundane world, and often challenge the definition of holiness. Sahni uses her religious and cultural backgrounds—Sikhism and Judaism—as springboards from which to question notions of the ecstatic in nature, sexuality and the body.

“Before I Had the Word invites us to consider what is essential and what is sacred: language, the body, pleasure, faith. It invites us to consider who we are, how we inhabit ourselves, how words—‘words that give and words that take away’—shape our experience. There are poems in this book that are etched in me now. Poems I’ll return to again and again. Poems I’ll teach. Poems I’ll share with my own daughter. This book is a gift.”
—Maggie Smith, author of Keep Moving

“How often do I read a debut collection to find myself left breathless by the beauty and craft of the poems? This is the case for Brooke Sahni’s Before I Had the Word, an exceptional collection of poems with pens in two worlds—Jewish and Sikh—and unafraid to mix faith with real life, with the body and sexuality, with loneliness, family, and grief. Throughout the book, there is meaningful questioning along with a profound understanding that we are sacred and that art is sacred. Sahni writes, why would god make an object/that can’t be touched when, already, I’ve touched so many beautiful things? These stunning poems go deep—to a soul level where they bring the reader in and share the holy here the world around us. You will be better for reading these poems, I know I am.”
—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides

“[Before I Had the Word] explores generational ties to grief, sex, family, and religion. Fearlessly mixing the divine and spiritual with the secular and mundane, Sahni challenges the very definitions of holiness and devotion […] offers the reader a place to process nostalgia, coming of age, and faith thoughtfully and clear-minded. Brooke Sahni has achieved a rare feat with Before I Had the Word, in poems that sing for both the ancient and the modern, the secular and the divine.”
—Jill Mceldowney, excerpt from Cleveland Review of Books

Divining

Winner of the Orison Chapbook Prize

In Brooke Sahni’s debut, Divining, the complexities of a young woman’s religious and cultural inheritances are plumbed in poems that resist easy simplifications. Sahni fashions a web of her own between Sikhism and Judaism, India and America.

“Tackling identity within the great cosmic order, Sahni’s work needles us to seek deeper.”
—Amy Boaz, The Taos News

“‘Sikh or Jewish?’ Brooke Sahni asks herself in Divining, her award-winning chapbook debut, delving into her mixed heritage from India and America, from Judaism and Sikhism—Sikh, which as a child she spelled seek, which is what Sahni does in this beautiful, searching collection. ‘Torah, they say you are holy…’ she writes in a poem that explores both text and body, mapping one to the other, concluding, ‘There’s a way to read myself—’ To read these poems is to witness a young writer finding herself as both a woman and as a person with a unique spiritual identity.”
—Jessica Jacobs

“In Divining, Brooke Sahni’s poems exalt the borders between human and divine, child and woman, and her personal need to understand her inheritances. Sahni writes, ‘so many things are calling us / in and out of ourselves,’ which is the way these fine poems operate, moving in and out of the seemingly incongruent wisdoms this world offers, to create a spiritual self. Who else could write: ‘I am too young to conceptualize the soul / what I mean is, I don’t think about metaphor?’ In poems full of beauty and inquiry, Sahni takes nothing for granted.”
—Connie Voisine