In a month-long act of resistance, poets remind us that poetry can push back against forces that marginalize voices, erase stories, and impose control over how we live and imagine.
An interview with Qurat Dar
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe Non-Prophet to someone picking it up for the first time?
QURAT DAR: Confessional poems incorporating a mix of Islamic and Sufi theology, nature, and existential dread with guest appearances by Godzilla, werewolves, and my mom.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
QURAT: “Loneliness is the drug from which all other drugs obtain their architecture.” from Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Fortune for Your Disaster. I remember the first time I read that line I had to put the book down and sit in stunned silence for a bit.
ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?
QURAT: I competed in poetry slam from 2018-2020, and having peers to write and perform with, as well an audience, kept me writing poems. Now, I’m lucky to be part of the Maza Arts Collective, where I get to experience writing as a relational practice, to make art with my friends (and friends through my art). Whenever someone tells me my work resonated with them, it makes me want to keep writing. As solitary as writing can be, community has really made me possible as a poet.
ALU: How do you sustain a practice of writing poetry in politically or personally challenging times?
QURAT: Writing poetry, for me, has often been a way to metabolize pain, a process of catharsis. That being said, I don’t force it. Sometimes you just have to sit with the hurt instead of making something from it.
Read “پاک صاف“ from Non-Prophet
صاف
We are a lineage of soft palms
and bitter tongues. In another
life I wouldn’t have to choose
between us which to love honestly.
One grandmother named me.
The other didn’t hide her
disappointment at the slight of yet another granddaughter.
The haze of dusk, within
the grasp of dawn. Orbit
beyond our control,
celestial unworkings.
Only martyrs are made holy
in bleeding. We wore gloves to
Quran class past thirteen, knowing He
would be displeased, His word defiled.
My mother tells me:
the greatest proof that God is a man
is what He lets happen to women.
That I must stop letting nature reclaim
my body. Clear-cut my skin every day.
Hide that the moon lives in me as much
as the sky. That I can go from crescent
swallowing darkness to full-circle splendour
a thousand times.
Reprinted with permission from Goose Lane Editions.
Watch Qurat read “پاک صاف“
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Qurat Dar is the author of Non-Prophet (icehouse poetry 2025), winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize. She was the City of Mississauga’s Youth Poet Laureate from 2021-2023 and the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam National Champion. Qurat’s poems have appeared in Augur, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, and across the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) network.
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Thanks to Qurat for answering our questions, and to Goose Lane Editions for the text from Non-Prophet, which is available to order now (and get 15% off + FREE shipping Canada-wide with the code POETSRESIST until April 30!).
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