“Jaia Hamid Bashir risks her own vision of the world, meaning she risks idiosyncrasy and bewilderment. That she so often attains the unity of the realized poem—a difficult thing, an elusive thing—is a testament to her gifts. In The Afterlife of Sweetness, she doesn't waste those gifts on the easy comforts of the facile. When these poems are beautiful, it is because they are true. The Afterlife of Sweetness is exactly what a first book should be: It is a next step, for the poet and also for poetry.” —Shane McCrae

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“The vision of The Afterlife of Sweetness has everything to do with poetic faith. ‘Let me pretend / I believe in something,’ Jaia Hamid Bashir can say coyly; but this is a poet whose line trembles with spiritual conviction. We are made believers by the intensity of her vision, by the sharp associative movements of image, awe, and memory that populate these pages. When Bashir asks, ‘How much / is about the displaced heart?’ I hear in the preposition ‘about’ not just subject matter, but location: It is a question of what frames displacement, how dislocations make up a mind. Bashir’s work is intoxicating and unparaphraseable. The person who holds this book should prepare themselves for transport.” —Jay Deshpande

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“The Afterlife of Sweetness is a transfixing collection whose layers gracefully unfurl through poems that fearlessly process the physical and psychological dilemmas of existence and mortality. In her adept portrayal of many contrasting subjects, settings, beauties, and griefs, Bashir creates a nuanced and fresh mode of encountering the world with all its dangers and raptures. The poems in this book are vivid, wise, intimate, and original.” —Marcus Jackson

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Jaia Hamid Bashir’s debut collection, 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 these journeys, 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, 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.