Grasping at this planet just to believe by Tanzila Ahmed
A decade in the making, this poetry collection was written over each Ramadan, the holy month of prayer and fasting for Muslims. I have been writing a Poem-A-Day every Ramadan since my mother passed. It was my way of developing a practice of art and spirituality during a difficult time of processing. The first year, I invited a couple of friends to join me, and that community grew to 70+ people of all kinds of Muslim-ish identity. We presented the group nationally at conferences, published in an online zine, and people from the group have taken their pieces on to be published in all kinds of places. Over the years, my poems shifted from writing about grief to writing love letters to my friends and to finding Allah in the miracles of nature to resisting rampant Islamophobia. The collection is presented in moon phases to reflect the shifting moods and feelings that a person experiences over the course of the fast.

