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What God Took Your Legs Away: Poems
These poems strive to leap out of the collection. These poems build a bed, watch a cult film, read the news. They take endless flights between the personal and the political, between the specific contours of Singapore’s landscape and the broader trajectories of global movements and inequity. But they can never find their way home.
it took me eight years but here I am, carving, carving
against my wounds until I hit the bone and start
Written over eight years, Wahid Al Mamun’s debut collection of poems is an intricate exploration of migration, memory and love, built on the intersections of private griefs and communal narratives, uttered in a voice both tender and unflinching. What God Took Your Legs Away deftly interrogates the tensions between the body, the nation and their intertwined histories, and asks what it means to write with—and against—one’s (be)longings. It’ll bring you to your knees and take your breath away.
it took me eight years but here I am, carving, carving
against my wounds until I hit the bone and start
Written over eight years, Wahid Al Mamun’s debut collection of poems is an intricate exploration of migration, memory and love, built on the intersections of private griefs and communal narratives, uttered in a voice both tender and unflinching. What God Took Your Legs Away deftly interrogates the tensions between the body, the nation and their intertwined histories, and asks what it means to write with—and against—one’s (be)longings. It’ll bring you to your knees and take your breath away.
98 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 5, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 23, 2025
Written over eight years, Wahid’s debut collection is an intricate exploration of migration, memory, and love, uttered in a voice both tender and unflinching. His poems are meaningfully arranged with certain events appearing recurrently, which I felt signified just how much space they took up within him.
He searches for what home means to him, whose identity is slipping in his loose grasp of a mother tongue, made worse by moving to a western land and trying desperately to fit in (impossible, for we can only change our actions and not our looks).
Wahid is raw and candid with his rage (“i honestly believe anger is the root of all writing”), cleanly dissecting past and recurring prejudice, supplemented with proper context (e.g Slide 8 of my Instagram post).
He also writes generously about love, about the little things that sum it up and the overwhelming affection he holds: “It is equally true that all writing sublimates around passion. At best, it fixes a burning flame in place. This is why I have struggled to write honestly about love.”
I read his poems again and again, amazed to understand something new every time. I don’t have much to add because Wahid’s poems quite literally speak for themselves; his nuanced style perfectly matches the troubled experiences and societal injustices he writes of, and I highly recommend this impactful collection.
He searches for what home means to him, whose identity is slipping in his loose grasp of a mother tongue, made worse by moving to a western land and trying desperately to fit in (impossible, for we can only change our actions and not our looks).
Wahid is raw and candid with his rage (“i honestly believe anger is the root of all writing”), cleanly dissecting past and recurring prejudice, supplemented with proper context (e.g Slide 8 of my Instagram post).
He also writes generously about love, about the little things that sum it up and the overwhelming affection he holds: “It is equally true that all writing sublimates around passion. At best, it fixes a burning flame in place. This is why I have struggled to write honestly about love.”
I read his poems again and again, amazed to understand something new every time. I don’t have much to add because Wahid’s poems quite literally speak for themselves; his nuanced style perfectly matches the troubled experiences and societal injustices he writes of, and I highly recommend this impactful collection.
August 5, 2025
Not everyone manages to speak to power the intricacies of migrant identities and belonging. Wahid Al Mumun does this with a brutal delicateness, straddling the line between tenderness and unflinching loudness. In this work, you will find a perspective on what the dissonance of shifting identities, as well as what it takes to unravel the art of a poet who has to navigate multiple identities.
Frankly, a great read. Will wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.
Frankly, a great read. Will wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.
August 18, 2025
gorgeous and moving and at times movingly angry about separation and the state of a city, or gorgeously in love, or grappling with a body's ungorgeousness; a pushing undercurrent of passion that frequently bursts
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews