FOR FILTHY WOMEN WHO WORRY ABOUT DISAPPOINTING GOD by Seema Yasmin

Seema Yasmin is a poet, doctor, professor and journalist who lives in Texas by way of England. Her writing explores how religion influences sexuality and the ways in which women of color reclaim their bodies, sexual agency and power. She trained in journalism at the University of Toronto and in medicine at the University of Cambridge. 

 

Seema Yasmin’s poems are born of the magic of the ritual of living, and perform the algebra of love and lust in the in-between, straddling the threshold of the holy and the unholy; these are visceral, bodily poems that choose to sing their truth, raw and plaintive and always defiant, never turning away from the difficult world where “errands end in death for Black men” and where every small freedom of identity a woman claims requires a sacred wager. 

—Allison Titus, author of The True Book of Animal Homes 

Seema Yasmin’s debut collection, For Filthy Women Who Worry About Disappointing God, glories in language and life at its most elemental: love and marriage, sex and medicine. These poems teach us how to survive even as fear, prejudice and oppression threaten to destroy the tenacious threads of love. Women’s bodies transcend systems of shame to become sacred, their voices rise up beautiful, raw and honeyed.

—Vanadana Khanna, author of The Goddess Monologues and Afternoon Masala 

 

Reviews:

 

• “Her body is the most treacherous place I have visited” – Seema Yasmin.

 

Interviews & Features:

 

• Verse Daily Feature

 

• Interviews with Poets

 

• Interview with Seema Yasmin