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HUM: Poems
Winner of the Backwaters Prize in PoetryThe word “hum” in Urdu can mean both “we” and “I.” In English, it’s a gesture of sound―a vibration. Sanam Sheriff’s HUM is a trans call to the beauty of attempt rather than the clarity of arrival. This book seeks as the pilgrim seeks, wandering from a plural sense of self with a lyric attunement to the wound’s power.Following a queer, trans, Muslim speaker who grew up in southern India and migrated to the United States, Sheriff’s debut collection invites us to to how yearning for a country blurs with yearning for a beloved; to how exile, for queer and trans people, is where the body itself becomes a place of dignity and prayer.Enriched by Urdu lyric traditions of love, and love mourned, HUM raises the queer erotic to the heavens, even as the grief of separation lingers as paradise lost. Here, Sheriff weaves together the two most potent threads of human pain and love, strummed until they sing.
84 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2026
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The Past Has Terrible Boundary Issues: Sanam Sheriff’s “HUM” and the Trouble With Becoming New
Bodies change, countries recede, lovers leave, languages interfere, fathers linger, and God keeps turning up anyway in a collection suspicious of every promise of a perfectly clean beginning.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | September 25th, 2026
Depending on the language, hum can contain a crowd. In Urdu, it can mean “we” and can stand where English expects an “I”; in English, the same three letters become a low continuous sound, something heard before it is interpreted. Sanam Sheriff places this linguistic surplus at the threshold of “HUM,” where it soon becomes more than a clever title. The voice speaking through these poems is crowded: by parents and lovers, India and America, God and surgeons, English and Urdu, wounds and pleasures, the body it inhabits and the bodies it remembers. Sheriff writes about change, certainly, but distrusts the reassuring story in which becoming oneself requires exposing an earlier self as counterfeit. “HUM” asks a harder question: What can a person carry forward without continuing to obey it?
Eros, prayer, migration, family damage, political violence and top surgery refuse to stay on separate shelves here. Country gets into sex; sex gets into prayer; prayer gets into the body; the body remembers family. English carries America even when it is being used to remember India. In a broken sequence of poems involving an “Emperor,” sexual violation survives inside later touch, so that the past behaves less like an archived event than a hand the nervous system still expects to feel. This crowdedness is not incidental to Sheriff’s idea of the self. Nobody arrives alone.
More revealing than calling “HUM” a book about identity is asking who has been allowed to name this self. A scholar supplies terminology. America supplies another vocabulary. Family supplies expectations. Religion supplies sacred words and sometimes the shame attached to them. Lovers can recognize the speaker and misrecognize them in the same embrace. Doctors eventually offer a surgical possibility. None of these voices simply disappears once the speaker knows more. What changes is jurisdiction: which description still has the right to govern the body, and which can be heard without being obeyed?
Even the father is denied the convenience of becoming a simple villain. In “Give Me Back to God,” Sheriff can see the injured child still living inside a man who has caused injury, imagining jasmine, prayer and rest for him. Then the poem turns. It wishes history could be reversed far enough for the speaker’s mother to encounter the young man who will become the father and simply keep walking. “Source” later admits more of his vulnerability. Nothing is acquitted. Knowing where damage came from may enlarge the story; it does not make the damage smaller.
The book takes its largest wager when faith and desire begin sharing a vocabulary. In “Ramadan Aubade,” “Salah” and “praise song,” queer eroticism and Muslim devotion are not seated politely beside one another like relatives warned to behave at a wedding. They mingle. Bedsheets and prayer rugs, breasts and mosques, fasting and hunger, begging and salah, bodily fluids and God enter the same weather. Sheriff neither turns Islam into pretty metaphor nor launders sex until it becomes spiritually presentable. More provocatively, the poems repossess the sacred words through which the speaker first learned surrender, awe and hunger. Shame does not get to keep them.
Read beside Kemi Alabi’s “Against Heaven,” which Sheriff acknowledges as part of the collection’s lineage, those sacred-erotic trespasses find a nearby kinship. Taylor Johnson’s “Inheritance,” another acknowledged precursor, clarifies a different aspect of Sheriff’s project: histories make a self without earning permanent control over it. Yet “HUM” has its own crowded coordinates. Muslim devotion, South Asian displacement, trans embodiment and erotic attachment keep crossing paths, until a lover can resemble homeland in one poem and sacred architecture in another. At times the metaphor strains. At its best, the categories themselves stop looking stable.
Imagery is Sheriff’s favorite piece of lyric contraband. Bodies become countries. Wounds acquire weather. Desire turns liquid. Breasts borrow sacred architecture. The diction slips among the botanical, bodily, devotional, medical and political, while the syntax tends to accrete, one image touching another until a poem has traveled farther than its opening announced. Then Sheriff sometimes clears the table. “Want is a Snapping Kind of Sound” leaves the history surrounding top surgery complicated while making the want itself plain. Elsewhere comes an even cleaner proposition: shame is native to no one. Such sentences hit harder because Sheriff has spent so much time teaching images to proliferate.
Proliferation has a cost. Water, blood, birds, flowers, mouths, breasts, wounds, prayer, light, sky, country and lover recur so insistently that the reader begins to recognize the circuitry. Some returns are superb because experience has altered the current running through them. Others merely switch the same lights back on. Several middle poems revisit distance, desire, geography and sacredness without changing their chemistry enough, and Sheriff’s reflex for beauty becomes a little too dependable. This is the collection’s clearest limitation. The poem has arrived; another metaphor comes knocking anyway.
At other moments, the problem is temperature. Pleasure, loneliness, violation and grief are all susceptible to flowering, flooding, glowing or becoming song. The two poems titled “Pogrom,” responding to the anti-Muslim violence in Delhi in February 2020, show what happens when Sheriff resists that reflex. A date. A photograph. A man returning from morning prayer. A murdered body. The obscenity of human remains. Metaphor remains, but those facts will not dissolve into it. The poems are strongest when the dead retain enough physical weight to resist becoming beautiful evidence for someone else’s argument.
Politics elsewhere enters through the mouth. America gives the speaker vocabulary capable of articulating gender while demanding another sort of linguistic obedience. In “This country is motherless and makes me forget,” assimilation feels almost physiological, a pressure to dream, desire, pray and grieve in American speech until an earlier name sounds strangely far away. India, meanwhile, can be loved without being prettified and left without becoming disposable. There is no winner in this geography. Both places continue exerting gravity; distance has repealed neither.
A Dore poem makes this conflict visible before one has finished reading it. Sheriff’s invented form subjects English-language poems to directional conventions associated with Urdu while bringing inherited and chosen poetic lineages into the structure; Agha Shahid Ali is among the poets invoked. Suddenly the page has the same problem as the speaker. English and Urdu, inheritance and invention, what has been received and what may be altered all have to occupy the same space. Sheriff does not preserve tradition in amber. The form pays respect by meddling.
Divisions that might make another collection orderly are mostly absent from “HUM.” There is no faith section followed by sex, no India followed by America, no trauma neatly preceding recovery, no clean wall between the pre-transition and post-transition body. Instead come broken sequences: the “Trans/” titles, the Emperor poems, the father, lovers, prayer, country. Their returns revise what we thought we knew. The father looks different once his own ghosts enter the room; trans keeps moving through transmission, translucency, transliteration and transfiguration. A later poem can reach backward and change an earlier one without altering a word of it.
Into this associative movement comes a clock. “Three Months Pre-Op,” “Eight Weeks Pre-Op,” “Six Weeks Pre-Op” and “One Week Pre-Op” suddenly make measurable what earlier poems allowed to drift among desire and recollection. Time becomes an appointment. The body is moving toward an operation, and the sequence acquires narrative pressure almost by stealth. Sheriff could easily have made surgery the climax that retrospectively explains the book. Instead the operation happens, matters enormously, and fails to settle everything.
Mourning is what prevents that sequence from hardening into a victory march. The breasts that will be removed appear through fruit, winter, landscape and burial; they are not villains awaiting expulsion. They grew there. They belonged to a life. Losing them can hurt without making their removal mistaken. Transition stories are often asked to perform an unnatural tidiness: liberation must contain no remainder, or grief gets recruited as evidence against certainty. Sheriff gives grief no such veto. One can know what one wants and mourn what wanting costs.
In “Two Months Post-Op,” healing sutures coexist with childhood memories of running with boys. The operation has changed the body without declaring its previous state fraudulent. That distinction reaches backward. Leaving India did not prove India was never home. A lover’s harm does not mean the love supplied nothing. Understanding the father does not require forgiving him. Queer desire does not demand the evacuation of Islam. Change, in Sheriff’s best poems, is not a courtroom in which the present self must prosecute the past.
Take inheritance, then, as the book’s more exact noun. Identity can sound finished; inheritance arrives with history attached. Sheriff receives a father but need not accept his terms, Islam but not shame’s interpretation of it, India but not compulsory nostalgia, America but not assimilation. English is available without becoming the only permissible syntax. The body itself is something received and then altered. Trauma is the inheritance nobody asked for: the Emperor poems keep returning to the awful possibility that later touch may still carry the fingerprint of earlier violation.
Recovery in “Soul” requires neither a pardon nor a tidy moral. The speaker can locate the source of pain without forgiving it. That distinction recurs elsewhere in less explicit forms: a relationship mattered and had to end; a father suffered and caused suffering; an old wound can be understood without becoming harmless. Sheriff is generous toward contradiction and suspicious of the idea that healing should produce a beautifully reconciled cast of characters. Not every ghost, once understood, deserves a key.
Outside these poems, trans bodies and gender-affirming medicine are subjects of an intense public fight, but “HUM” becomes most interesting where the vocabulary of that fight goes blunt. Sheriff writes waiting, wanting, fear, medical dependence, the surrender involved in allowing another person’s hands to alter the body, and what the body remembers afterward. These are poor raw materials for a slogan. Policy can argue about a category. A poem has to wake up inside the body afterward.
Precisely here, though, the book’s theory of return exposes its own limit. Blood, water, bird, prayer and country do not acquire fresh meaning merely by appearing again. A leaner middle, or a few poems willing to remain plain for longer, might have made Sheriff’s lushness strange again. My final rating is 88/100, corresponding to 4/5 Goodreads stars: the best poems reach beyond that bracket, but the whole collection does not quite sustain their level of discovery. Its abundance sometimes replenishes itself; sometimes it merely accumulates.
Overcorrecting that abundance would produce a tidier and probably lesser book. The repetitions belong to Sheriff’s account of how experience lingers. One poem is meant to vibrate inside the next; one state of the body remains audible in another; India sounds inside America; prayer keeps traces of sex and sex of prayer. The difficulty is deciding when an echo has deepened and when it has simply repeated. “HUM” does not always know. Neither would I want it scrubbed so clean that nothing echoes at all.
Under the usual architecture of a transition narrative, surgery might have supplied the final page. Sheriff keeps writing. “Trans/figuration” widens bodily alteration into the question of being made anew without becoming ahistorical; “In a Language Not Mine, Speak” circles back to desire, country, grief, prayer and the stubborn activity of memory. There is no ribbon-cutting ceremony for the authentic self. Love has quieted rather than vanished. The changed body still carries time.
Language remains the place to which the speaker returns because none of the available languages is sufficient. Words once unavailable become necessary; words supplied by America can liberate and constrain; Urdu and English approach each other without producing perfect equivalents. The Dore puts that insufficiency on the page, while hum puts it in the mouth. Sheriff never discovers the vocabulary that will translate the self without remainder. By the end, that failure begins to look less like a problem requiring repair. No language receives last jurisdiction.
On reaching the final poem, the opening I/we distinction no longer feels like a multilingual trick. It describes a crowded self. The “I” houses the mother who looked away, the father whose suffering cannot excuse his damage, lovers who offered pleasure and injury, India, America, God, surgeons, poets, the dead, the former body and the altered one. Purity would require an eviction “HUM” has no interest in carrying out. The task is not to empty the house. It is to decide who inside it still gets a vote.
Sheriff’s best poems enact that freedom rather than announce it. To change is not to prove the earlier life counterfeit. Leaving does not make a person originless. Survival carries no requirement to forgive. “HUM” begins with a word roomy enough for the singular and plural to inhabit together and ends without settling their argument. Between them, a body changes shape, English learns to move in another direction, and memory keeps passing its thread through the opening – not stitching the old life shut, but discovering that the opening can itself be a way through.
Bodies change, countries recede, lovers leave, languages interfere, fathers linger, and God keeps turning up anyway in a collection suspicious of every promise of a perfectly clean beginning.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | September 25th, 2026
Depending on the language, hum can contain a crowd. In Urdu, it can mean “we” and can stand where English expects an “I”; in English, the same three letters become a low continuous sound, something heard before it is interpreted. Sanam Sheriff places this linguistic surplus at the threshold of “HUM,” where it soon becomes more than a clever title. The voice speaking through these poems is crowded: by parents and lovers, India and America, God and surgeons, English and Urdu, wounds and pleasures, the body it inhabits and the bodies it remembers. Sheriff writes about change, certainly, but distrusts the reassuring story in which becoming oneself requires exposing an earlier self as counterfeit. “HUM” asks a harder question: What can a person carry forward without continuing to obey it?
Eros, prayer, migration, family damage, political violence and top surgery refuse to stay on separate shelves here. Country gets into sex; sex gets into prayer; prayer gets into the body; the body remembers family. English carries America even when it is being used to remember India. In a broken sequence of poems involving an “Emperor,” sexual violation survives inside later touch, so that the past behaves less like an archived event than a hand the nervous system still expects to feel. This crowdedness is not incidental to Sheriff’s idea of the self. Nobody arrives alone.
More revealing than calling “HUM” a book about identity is asking who has been allowed to name this self. A scholar supplies terminology. America supplies another vocabulary. Family supplies expectations. Religion supplies sacred words and sometimes the shame attached to them. Lovers can recognize the speaker and misrecognize them in the same embrace. Doctors eventually offer a surgical possibility. None of these voices simply disappears once the speaker knows more. What changes is jurisdiction: which description still has the right to govern the body, and which can be heard without being obeyed?
Even the father is denied the convenience of becoming a simple villain. In “Give Me Back to God,” Sheriff can see the injured child still living inside a man who has caused injury, imagining jasmine, prayer and rest for him. Then the poem turns. It wishes history could be reversed far enough for the speaker’s mother to encounter the young man who will become the father and simply keep walking. “Source” later admits more of his vulnerability. Nothing is acquitted. Knowing where damage came from may enlarge the story; it does not make the damage smaller.
The book takes its largest wager when faith and desire begin sharing a vocabulary. In “Ramadan Aubade,” “Salah” and “praise song,” queer eroticism and Muslim devotion are not seated politely beside one another like relatives warned to behave at a wedding. They mingle. Bedsheets and prayer rugs, breasts and mosques, fasting and hunger, begging and salah, bodily fluids and God enter the same weather. Sheriff neither turns Islam into pretty metaphor nor launders sex until it becomes spiritually presentable. More provocatively, the poems repossess the sacred words through which the speaker first learned surrender, awe and hunger. Shame does not get to keep them.
Read beside Kemi Alabi’s “Against Heaven,” which Sheriff acknowledges as part of the collection’s lineage, those sacred-erotic trespasses find a nearby kinship. Taylor Johnson’s “Inheritance,” another acknowledged precursor, clarifies a different aspect of Sheriff’s project: histories make a self without earning permanent control over it. Yet “HUM” has its own crowded coordinates. Muslim devotion, South Asian displacement, trans embodiment and erotic attachment keep crossing paths, until a lover can resemble homeland in one poem and sacred architecture in another. At times the metaphor strains. At its best, the categories themselves stop looking stable.
Imagery is Sheriff’s favorite piece of lyric contraband. Bodies become countries. Wounds acquire weather. Desire turns liquid. Breasts borrow sacred architecture. The diction slips among the botanical, bodily, devotional, medical and political, while the syntax tends to accrete, one image touching another until a poem has traveled farther than its opening announced. Then Sheriff sometimes clears the table. “Want is a Snapping Kind of Sound” leaves the history surrounding top surgery complicated while making the want itself plain. Elsewhere comes an even cleaner proposition: shame is native to no one. Such sentences hit harder because Sheriff has spent so much time teaching images to proliferate.
Proliferation has a cost. Water, blood, birds, flowers, mouths, breasts, wounds, prayer, light, sky, country and lover recur so insistently that the reader begins to recognize the circuitry. Some returns are superb because experience has altered the current running through them. Others merely switch the same lights back on. Several middle poems revisit distance, desire, geography and sacredness without changing their chemistry enough, and Sheriff’s reflex for beauty becomes a little too dependable. This is the collection’s clearest limitation. The poem has arrived; another metaphor comes knocking anyway.
At other moments, the problem is temperature. Pleasure, loneliness, violation and grief are all susceptible to flowering, flooding, glowing or becoming song. The two poems titled “Pogrom,” responding to the anti-Muslim violence in Delhi in February 2020, show what happens when Sheriff resists that reflex. A date. A photograph. A man returning from morning prayer. A murdered body. The obscenity of human remains. Metaphor remains, but those facts will not dissolve into it. The poems are strongest when the dead retain enough physical weight to resist becoming beautiful evidence for someone else’s argument.
Politics elsewhere enters through the mouth. America gives the speaker vocabulary capable of articulating gender while demanding another sort of linguistic obedience. In “This country is motherless and makes me forget,” assimilation feels almost physiological, a pressure to dream, desire, pray and grieve in American speech until an earlier name sounds strangely far away. India, meanwhile, can be loved without being prettified and left without becoming disposable. There is no winner in this geography. Both places continue exerting gravity; distance has repealed neither.
A Dore poem makes this conflict visible before one has finished reading it. Sheriff’s invented form subjects English-language poems to directional conventions associated with Urdu while bringing inherited and chosen poetic lineages into the structure; Agha Shahid Ali is among the poets invoked. Suddenly the page has the same problem as the speaker. English and Urdu, inheritance and invention, what has been received and what may be altered all have to occupy the same space. Sheriff does not preserve tradition in amber. The form pays respect by meddling.
Divisions that might make another collection orderly are mostly absent from “HUM.” There is no faith section followed by sex, no India followed by America, no trauma neatly preceding recovery, no clean wall between the pre-transition and post-transition body. Instead come broken sequences: the “Trans/” titles, the Emperor poems, the father, lovers, prayer, country. Their returns revise what we thought we knew. The father looks different once his own ghosts enter the room; trans keeps moving through transmission, translucency, transliteration and transfiguration. A later poem can reach backward and change an earlier one without altering a word of it.
Into this associative movement comes a clock. “Three Months Pre-Op,” “Eight Weeks Pre-Op,” “Six Weeks Pre-Op” and “One Week Pre-Op” suddenly make measurable what earlier poems allowed to drift among desire and recollection. Time becomes an appointment. The body is moving toward an operation, and the sequence acquires narrative pressure almost by stealth. Sheriff could easily have made surgery the climax that retrospectively explains the book. Instead the operation happens, matters enormously, and fails to settle everything.
Mourning is what prevents that sequence from hardening into a victory march. The breasts that will be removed appear through fruit, winter, landscape and burial; they are not villains awaiting expulsion. They grew there. They belonged to a life. Losing them can hurt without making their removal mistaken. Transition stories are often asked to perform an unnatural tidiness: liberation must contain no remainder, or grief gets recruited as evidence against certainty. Sheriff gives grief no such veto. One can know what one wants and mourn what wanting costs.
In “Two Months Post-Op,” healing sutures coexist with childhood memories of running with boys. The operation has changed the body without declaring its previous state fraudulent. That distinction reaches backward. Leaving India did not prove India was never home. A lover’s harm does not mean the love supplied nothing. Understanding the father does not require forgiving him. Queer desire does not demand the evacuation of Islam. Change, in Sheriff’s best poems, is not a courtroom in which the present self must prosecute the past.
Take inheritance, then, as the book’s more exact noun. Identity can sound finished; inheritance arrives with history attached. Sheriff receives a father but need not accept his terms, Islam but not shame’s interpretation of it, India but not compulsory nostalgia, America but not assimilation. English is available without becoming the only permissible syntax. The body itself is something received and then altered. Trauma is the inheritance nobody asked for: the Emperor poems keep returning to the awful possibility that later touch may still carry the fingerprint of earlier violation.
Recovery in “Soul” requires neither a pardon nor a tidy moral. The speaker can locate the source of pain without forgiving it. That distinction recurs elsewhere in less explicit forms: a relationship mattered and had to end; a father suffered and caused suffering; an old wound can be understood without becoming harmless. Sheriff is generous toward contradiction and suspicious of the idea that healing should produce a beautifully reconciled cast of characters. Not every ghost, once understood, deserves a key.
Outside these poems, trans bodies and gender-affirming medicine are subjects of an intense public fight, but “HUM” becomes most interesting where the vocabulary of that fight goes blunt. Sheriff writes waiting, wanting, fear, medical dependence, the surrender involved in allowing another person’s hands to alter the body, and what the body remembers afterward. These are poor raw materials for a slogan. Policy can argue about a category. A poem has to wake up inside the body afterward.
Precisely here, though, the book’s theory of return exposes its own limit. Blood, water, bird, prayer and country do not acquire fresh meaning merely by appearing again. A leaner middle, or a few poems willing to remain plain for longer, might have made Sheriff’s lushness strange again. My final rating is 88/100, corresponding to 4/5 Goodreads stars: the best poems reach beyond that bracket, but the whole collection does not quite sustain their level of discovery. Its abundance sometimes replenishes itself; sometimes it merely accumulates.
Overcorrecting that abundance would produce a tidier and probably lesser book. The repetitions belong to Sheriff’s account of how experience lingers. One poem is meant to vibrate inside the next; one state of the body remains audible in another; India sounds inside America; prayer keeps traces of sex and sex of prayer. The difficulty is deciding when an echo has deepened and when it has simply repeated. “HUM” does not always know. Neither would I want it scrubbed so clean that nothing echoes at all.
Under the usual architecture of a transition narrative, surgery might have supplied the final page. Sheriff keeps writing. “Trans/figuration” widens bodily alteration into the question of being made anew without becoming ahistorical; “In a Language Not Mine, Speak” circles back to desire, country, grief, prayer and the stubborn activity of memory. There is no ribbon-cutting ceremony for the authentic self. Love has quieted rather than vanished. The changed body still carries time.
Language remains the place to which the speaker returns because none of the available languages is sufficient. Words once unavailable become necessary; words supplied by America can liberate and constrain; Urdu and English approach each other without producing perfect equivalents. The Dore puts that insufficiency on the page, while hum puts it in the mouth. Sheriff never discovers the vocabulary that will translate the self without remainder. By the end, that failure begins to look less like a problem requiring repair. No language receives last jurisdiction.
On reaching the final poem, the opening I/we distinction no longer feels like a multilingual trick. It describes a crowded self. The “I” houses the mother who looked away, the father whose suffering cannot excuse his damage, lovers who offered pleasure and injury, India, America, God, surgeons, poets, the dead, the former body and the altered one. Purity would require an eviction “HUM” has no interest in carrying out. The task is not to empty the house. It is to decide who inside it still gets a vote.
Sheriff’s best poems enact that freedom rather than announce it. To change is not to prove the earlier life counterfeit. Leaving does not make a person originless. Survival carries no requirement to forgive. “HUM” begins with a word roomy enough for the singular and plural to inhabit together and ends without settling their argument. Between them, a body changes shape, English learns to move in another direction, and memory keeps passing its thread through the opening – not stitching the old life shut, but discovering that the opening can itself be a way through.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
HUM by Sanam Sheriff was a decent poetry book. I liked some of them, but some of them were a poetic style she created that she didn't explain how to read till the end of the book which confused me - perhaps it would have been better to explain what it was at the beginning of the book, instead?
The subject matter was quite interesting. I made note of some quotes from my favorite poems which I'll reread sometimes. I liked the recurring "emperor" character---I wasn't sure exactly who he was meant to be in the poems, but in some poems it felt like he might be God. My favorite poem was "The Emperor Pats His Lips With a Napkin", but I also liked "This country is motherless and makes me forget" and several others, as well.
One thing that really impressed me about Sheriff's poetic style was using different yet similar sounding words many times in a poem or even using the same word in different ways. I thought that had a really interesting effect---especially in my favorite poem The Emperor Pats His Lips With a Napkin. Sheriff also seems to have an innate sense of rhythm in her work which I enjoyed. Overall, I'm not sure that this poetry book in lifechanging, per se, but I'll remember it.
I was given this book for free as an e-ARC on NetGalley.
The subject matter was quite interesting. I made note of some quotes from my favorite poems which I'll reread sometimes. I liked the recurring "emperor" character---I wasn't sure exactly who he was meant to be in the poems, but in some poems it felt like he might be God. My favorite poem was "The Emperor Pats His Lips With a Napkin", but I also liked "This country is motherless and makes me forget" and several others, as well.
One thing that really impressed me about Sheriff's poetic style was using different yet similar sounding words many times in a poem or even using the same word in different ways. I thought that had a really interesting effect---especially in my favorite poem The Emperor Pats His Lips With a Napkin. Sheriff also seems to have an innate sense of rhythm in her work which I enjoyed. Overall, I'm not sure that this poetry book in lifechanging, per se, but I'll remember it.
I was given this book for free as an e-ARC on NetGalley.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Hum by Sanam Sheriff feels like an intimate invitation into what it means to be unapologetically human.
Every poem carries the weight of love, grief, longing, and becoming in a way that settles deep beneath your skin and lingers in the quiet between your bones.
Sheriff allowing readers into their trans experience feels undeniably sacred. The poems surrounding life before and after surgery are some of the most vulnerable, breathtaking pieces I’ve read in a long time. They made me want to get on my knees and thank them for making me feel so deeply that my soul remembered what it truly means to exist.
This collection is important. It is love. It is loss. It is grief. It is hope. It is humanity. Above all, it is an act of extraordinary courage in a world that too often teaches people to shrink themselves in the face of shame.
Hum reminds us that there is profound beauty in being fully, unapologetically yourself.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this devastating collection of poetry.
Every poem carries the weight of love, grief, longing, and becoming in a way that settles deep beneath your skin and lingers in the quiet between your bones.
Sheriff allowing readers into their trans experience feels undeniably sacred. The poems surrounding life before and after surgery are some of the most vulnerable, breathtaking pieces I’ve read in a long time. They made me want to get on my knees and thank them for making me feel so deeply that my soul remembered what it truly means to exist.
This collection is important. It is love. It is loss. It is grief. It is hope. It is humanity. Above all, it is an act of extraordinary courage in a world that too often teaches people to shrink themselves in the face of shame.
Hum reminds us that there is profound beauty in being fully, unapologetically yourself.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this devastating collection of poetry.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
"ode to the filth. that country beyond fear. her love / lashing me through and latching me here. here, / where the home in me laps up the home in her."
the poetry in this book push patterns, tradition, and offer moments of exploring the self. the writing is of the present, the cadence feels ancient, and the storytelling teeters in-between. reverse poetry, mixing English with Urdu, it all felt like an unexplored form of expressing the author's push and pull with belonging and wanting. Sheriff takes the word “hum” in Urdu (ہم), meaning both “we” and “I”, and applies the plurality of identity(ies) to the trans / queer and immigrant space, all while keeping hold of the Muslim-American experience. I feel that the writing is lyrical and very strong, the poems bolster each other and discusses humanness regardless all of our shades of shame, our desires, our ways of loving, our guilt, and our mourning
arc accessed via Edelweiss+
the poetry in this book push patterns, tradition, and offer moments of exploring the self. the writing is of the present, the cadence feels ancient, and the storytelling teeters in-between. reverse poetry, mixing English with Urdu, it all felt like an unexplored form of expressing the author's push and pull with belonging and wanting. Sheriff takes the word “hum” in Urdu (ہم), meaning both “we” and “I”, and applies the plurality of identity(ies) to the trans / queer and immigrant space, all while keeping hold of the Muslim-American experience. I feel that the writing is lyrical and very strong, the poems bolster each other and discusses humanness regardless all of our shades of shame, our desires, our ways of loving, our guilt, and our mourning
arc accessed via Edelweiss+
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.
Aourgh these poems were. Amazing. I LOVED the way in which the author uses the medium. So many poems that just made me go OH!!!! The one in which the poem is written from right to left... Aourgh.
I'm really not the best at reviewing poetry, but this collection really elicited reactions in me, and it made me want to talk to people about the FORM of it all, which is rare. The meaning of a poem, sure, but wanting to discuss the FORM? That's not something I want to do very often. And through all of this, the poems still feel accessible in the way that they do need some degree of decoding, but it doesn't feel like you need a literature degree to get anything out of the poems other than "words pretty". I love a poetry collection that is simple and straightforward without neglecting its nature as an art.
Aourgh these poems were. Amazing. I LOVED the way in which the author uses the medium. So many poems that just made me go OH!!!! The one in which the poem is written from right to left... Aourgh.
I'm really not the best at reviewing poetry, but this collection really elicited reactions in me, and it made me want to talk to people about the FORM of it all, which is rare. The meaning of a poem, sure, but wanting to discuss the FORM? That's not something I want to do very often. And through all of this, the poems still feel accessible in the way that they do need some degree of decoding, but it doesn't feel like you need a literature degree to get anything out of the poems other than "words pretty". I love a poetry collection that is simple and straightforward without neglecting its nature as an art.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I received this advance review copy for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.
This was an amazing book of poetry, and easily in my top 10 for the year.
It's wonderfully lyrical, and dives deeply into gender, sexuality, and being trans. There is also a deep mix of love, sensuality, and grief all tied into their body and that of their partner's as well. You also have the feelings of where being trans intersects with family and religion too. It's always so complicated. There is also the journey into becoming yourself, and feelings about surgery and making physical changes to your body to match who you are on the inside.
It's so incredibly beautiful, and words will make you want to weep.
This was an amazing book of poetry, and easily in my top 10 for the year.
It's wonderfully lyrical, and dives deeply into gender, sexuality, and being trans. There is also a deep mix of love, sensuality, and grief all tied into their body and that of their partner's as well. You also have the feelings of where being trans intersects with family and religion too. It's always so complicated. There is also the journey into becoming yourself, and feelings about surgery and making physical changes to your body to match who you are on the inside.
It's so incredibly beautiful, and words will make you want to weep.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
HUM is an exquisite collection of poetry about the art of being human. As humans...we are many things in one body. We are our ancestors, our race, our sexuality, our faith and our dreams and the desire and right be our true selves. This collection reminds us that, inside, we all know who we really are. Others may judge, or demand that we be who THEY expect us to be, but to live the wonderful life that we've been gifted we must be who we know we are. I highly recommend #HUM to any audience, especially those who wish to understand the transgender person they love, or are. Thank you #netgalley for allowing me to read and review #HUM.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This is a very good collection of poems. Using accessible language and imagery the poet conveys a range of emotion and experience.
The form of "Understudy Emperor's The" is an interesting way to get the reader to see the words in a new light. I don't often read poetry so it was the first time I saw the form. It gives a quite different feel to words than the hourglass ebb and flow of "I watch my country on a stream, I switch it off."
Poetry is very personal in my opinion. One thing I really like about this book is that the poems are different enough that when one would lose my attention another would reel me back into this collection of thought.
The form of "Understudy Emperor's The" is an interesting way to get the reader to see the words in a new light. I don't often read poetry so it was the first time I saw the form. It gives a quite different feel to words than the hourglass ebb and flow of "I watch my country on a stream, I switch it off."
Poetry is very personal in my opinion. One thing I really like about this book is that the poems are different enough that when one would lose my attention another would reel me back into this collection of thought.
August 9, 2026
Thank you to the University of Nebraska Press/Backwaters Press and Sanam Sheriff for providing an e-ARC in exchange for honest review!
HUM was such a thought provoking poetry collection that explores the experiences of a trans, Indian Muslim immigrant to the United States and the way that these identities coalesce. I did have a difficult time with a few of the poems formatting-wise, but I didn’t dock for this as the author explains at the end why these choices were made and I found it to be quite unique! I felt particularly drawn to the poems about transness and gender identity as they felt incredibly intimate and relatable.
HUM was such a thought provoking poetry collection that explores the experiences of a trans, Indian Muslim immigrant to the United States and the way that these identities coalesce. I did have a difficult time with a few of the poems formatting-wise, but I didn’t dock for this as the author explains at the end why these choices were made and I found it to be quite unique! I felt particularly drawn to the poems about transness and gender identity as they felt incredibly intimate and relatable.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This is lovely. I'm not sure how accessible it will be for those who don't make a habit of reading poetry, but I found it beautiful, thoughtful, and moving. I feel like anything I could say about this would sound pretentious, which is the trouble with writing about poetry. I'll settle for saying that I liked it, I found the style haunting, and those mirror poems, which aren't quite mirror poems, slowed down my speed-reading brain and really made me sit with the word choice and imagery.
The volume is quite short, but many of the poems are as well. Always down to find a new trans poet. :)
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
The volume is quite short, but many of the poems are as well. Always down to find a new trans poet. :)
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
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September 15, 2026ARC REVIEW
I am fairly new to reading poetry but I really enjoyed the themes throughout this collection. I also thought the poems written in unique format (what the author calls "Dore") were an interesting experience and really made me take my time with the words. I do wish the explanation of how to read these came at the front of the collection, rather than at the end.
I am fairly new to reading poetry but I really enjoyed the themes throughout this collection. I also thought the poems written in unique format (what the author calls "Dore") were an interesting experience and really made me take my time with the words. I do wish the explanation of how to read these came at the front of the collection, rather than at the end.
September 5, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley and backwater press for a copy of this to read. Sanam sheriff writes poetry so powerfully, moving, beautiful, yet heartbreaking. I’ll continue to follow this author. Check this out when it comes out October 1, 2026.
October 18, 2026
HUM: Poems by Sanam Sheriff is a beautiful, moving collection exploring identity, love, exile, and belonging. The lyrical writing is deeply emotional and thought-provoking, celebrating the courage to seek connection and self-discovery. A powerful and memorable poetry collection.
September 11, 2026
Rating: 3.75 / 5 Stars
"I didn't want to be touched. I wanted to be believed."
HUM is a poetry collection focused on body dysmorphia, gender-affirming care, faith, and memory. It follows the emotional and physical timeline of preparing for and recovering from top surgery, highlighting the tension between public perception and personal identity.
There are definitely strong moments here. The imagery surrounding surgery, fear, and bodily autonomy in pieces like "Three Months Pre-Op" and "Eight Weeks Pre-Op, Walking into the Women’s Bathroom off I-95" is raw and vulnerable. The blending of religious imagery with queer identity also gives certain poems a grounded, emotional center.
However, the collection relies heavily on structural experimentation that didn't land for me. Multiple poems are written in reversed, fractured, backwards syntax. Encountering this technique repeatedly pulled me right out of the flow of the book. Instead of enhancing the emotion, it felt jarring and unnecessary, making those pages a chore to read through.
While the central theme is deeply personal and impactful, the repetitive stylistic choices ultimately bogged down the reading experience
"I didn't want to be touched. I wanted to be believed."
HUM is a poetry collection focused on body dysmorphia, gender-affirming care, faith, and memory. It follows the emotional and physical timeline of preparing for and recovering from top surgery, highlighting the tension between public perception and personal identity.
There are definitely strong moments here. The imagery surrounding surgery, fear, and bodily autonomy in pieces like "Three Months Pre-Op" and "Eight Weeks Pre-Op, Walking into the Women’s Bathroom off I-95" is raw and vulnerable. The blending of religious imagery with queer identity also gives certain poems a grounded, emotional center.
However, the collection relies heavily on structural experimentation that didn't land for me. Multiple poems are written in reversed, fractured, backwards syntax. Encountering this technique repeatedly pulled me right out of the flow of the book. Instead of enhancing the emotion, it felt jarring and unnecessary, making those pages a chore to read through.
While the central theme is deeply personal and impactful, the repetitive stylistic choices ultimately bogged down the reading experience
August 17, 2026
Thank you NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press for this advanced readers copy of Sanam Sheriff’s Hum in exchange for an honest review. My words are my own.
Sanam Sheriff’s collection of poetry is prismatic in its messages and also its symbolism. In Urdu, the title word “hum” means both “we” and “I”, allowing for the fluidity between the singular and the inclusive collective. However, in English it just means a gesture of a sound - not even a full entity, but simply a vibration. Before penetrating these poems, Sheriff requires us to ask with this one word, how do the words we use construct aliveness? In nonwestern realities, a single word can create an individual or even a collective, but in western society, they can only be a murmur. This is Sheriff’s lesson to us: that there are bodies, identities that we have made into whispers but that are so much louder and resounding that they can pluralize into multitudes. Voices like Sheriff’s - queer, trans, South Indian, immigrant - must supersede those that have historically boomed.
Just as “hum” births a multiplicity our language doesn’t envision, Sheriff’s poems dictate identities with a fluidity our society deconstructs. In “Not Forgetting, But Choosing To” Sheriff talks of the dissolution of plural identity when entering American culture. They write, “what’s forbidden can escape language. We lived in wordless air…when the ship stopped, Americans said pronouns….scholars said labels” (17). Bodies that escape the western understanding can move with less corporeality, can traverse the liminality of hum. When docked amidst our unhallowed shores, they are sewn into categories so we may eschew difference. What a powerful poetic demonstration of transmorphing and as Sheriff writes, trans/lucency. I was engulfed by this poetry, reflected in it as a queer person, and jubilant that a voice like this is now alive in our literary world.
Sanam Sheriff’s collection of poetry is prismatic in its messages and also its symbolism. In Urdu, the title word “hum” means both “we” and “I”, allowing for the fluidity between the singular and the inclusive collective. However, in English it just means a gesture of a sound - not even a full entity, but simply a vibration. Before penetrating these poems, Sheriff requires us to ask with this one word, how do the words we use construct aliveness? In nonwestern realities, a single word can create an individual or even a collective, but in western society, they can only be a murmur. This is Sheriff’s lesson to us: that there are bodies, identities that we have made into whispers but that are so much louder and resounding that they can pluralize into multitudes. Voices like Sheriff’s - queer, trans, South Indian, immigrant - must supersede those that have historically boomed.
Just as “hum” births a multiplicity our language doesn’t envision, Sheriff’s poems dictate identities with a fluidity our society deconstructs. In “Not Forgetting, But Choosing To” Sheriff talks of the dissolution of plural identity when entering American culture. They write, “what’s forbidden can escape language. We lived in wordless air…when the ship stopped, Americans said pronouns….scholars said labels” (17). Bodies that escape the western understanding can move with less corporeality, can traverse the liminality of hum. When docked amidst our unhallowed shores, they are sewn into categories so we may eschew difference. What a powerful poetic demonstration of transmorphing and as Sheriff writes, trans/lucency. I was engulfed by this poetry, reflected in it as a queer person, and jubilant that a voice like this is now alive in our literary world.
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