Bøger af Sadiqa de Meijer

alfabet / alphabet is the record of Sadiqa de Meijer's transition from speaking Dutch to English. Exploring questions of identity, landscape, family, and translation, the essays navigate the shifting cultural currents of language by using an eclectic approach to storytelling. As such, fellow linguistic migrants to anglophone Canada will recognize elements of their experience in alfabet / alphabet, while lifelong English speakers will perceive their mother tongue in a new light.

The Outer Wards, Sadiqa de Meijer's new collection, explores questions of maternal love and duty-and the powerlessness that comes with the disruption of that role through illness. "I was awake. / The hour was wrong," de Meijer writes, and her poems track, in visceral and tender detail, the distraction, exhaustion, exhilaration, and fear of child-rearing through crisis. For de Meijer, the experience was also a crisis of language, and the struggle to find new terms for her state. Addressed, in part, to a child she calls "my grievous spectacle, / my dearest unpossessable," The Outer Wards is everywhere marked by a joy in words-their quick-fire turns, sumptuous sounds, and nursery-rhyme seductions.