I gotta confess I found the works of Noor Unnahar by mere happenstance, scrolling down on Pinterest and I enjoyed the quality and content of her works, as well as being namesakes. Her signature collage-style visual art caught my attention and I was pleasantly surprised by reading her latest poetry book, "New Names for Lost Things".
It was a powerful combination of poems on loneliness, grief, family, city life and the shadows of missed expectations. I've always thought poetry can be such a vessel of the emotional state and as well a beacon to light our ways even in the midst of dark feelings. Unnahar made such a great job blending a number of emotions in these poems, focusing perhaps on grief and loneliness a little bit too much for some but I thought they were enjoyable.
Having the collage art present between pages created a good combination with the feeling the poems had. It's also vibrant the way she wears proudly her heritage - a Pakistani female poetess - and opens the door to let us appreciate her roots and how they are part of what she is.
There are some quotes that I found interesting when talking about grief, like this one:
"May your grief find a dark fine door ajar and leave."
This sounds like something we often do in society, looking at grief as something you have to get over it and keep moving on, but like Vision and Andrew Garfield just mentioned this year, perhaps we don't ever get over it completely and learn to live with it. Perhaps grief is indeed love persevering and unexpressed love to who or what we lost, and we just find the way to keep moving with it.
Nevertheless any potential conflicts one might have with the quotes from it, I think this book and its poems are a good tool to bring up conversation about these topics and reflect on them. I recommend taking a look at it!
New Names for Lost Things by Noor Unnahar was released on October 19th, 2021 both in physical and digital formats. Thank you NetGalley and Noor Unnahar for the ARC!
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