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.
