When Time is Circular

Intimate collection of poems that explore how immigration, Black identity, and Queerness are all tied through time.

“I wrote this book as a way to go back in time,” Shams Alkamil says of her new poetry collection, inspired by the movie Arrival to see “how language and the experiences of life are not linear. Rather, they are circular.”


She begins with her own birth, but her story is far older than that, the timeless experience of womanhood, and in her case the discovery of her identity as a young “Black Muslimah” immigrant in America, circling among worlds and cultures. Inevitably she encounters violence, personally and globally (her “Ode to the Women of Palestine” has never been more necessary), and she writes her way through “anger, which really was just grief with a scary mask.” In “Time Became Circular in 2023” she determines to “plant a downtrodden stick into the [preceding] calendar year” for the sake of “every martyred soul who can never leave 2023, no matter how desperately they plead from the grave. / Yes, yes, I think it is better if I stay in 2023. I’d like not to forget how we got into this mess.”


But she also suggests a way out of the mess, in her discovery that “love is also circular. It is never lost, never abandoned, never conditional. The thread of time is, and always will be, stitched by the needle of love.”