“In her evocative debut collection, Laila Malik draws on memory, not only personal recollection but ancestral and cultural heritage.” —Barb Carey, Toronto Star

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"Malik plays with and pushes language in her debut collection. She creates word combinations and strings together evocative lines. Home is constantly in a state of flux." —Manahil Bandukwala, Quill and Quire

 

“This may be the first full-length poetry collection in English to take the Gulf itself as its subject matter. The impulse to erase the place you are in because it is erasing you is too strong. Yet though they dwell on the discomfort, vulnerability and potential violence of not-belonging, these poems feel equally at home everywhere, moving very naturally and horizontally between parts of Canada, the Arabian Gulf, East Africa, and South Asia, and reminding us that migration and movement are written into the very histories of these regions.”

—Noor Naga, Giller Prize finalist, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

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"In Laila Malik's archipelago, we face the future like we face the sea, or the desert: any great expanse we try to love, cross, or become. Malik's vocabulary is a bridge—littered with secrets, inside jokes, careful references—that carries us over various landscapes, oceans, the wreckages of capitalism, colonialism and climate collapse."

 —Sanna Wani, author of My Grief, the Sun

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"Malik’s writing startles and delights word by word. She is playful with multiple languages, cultures and settings, and has created a collection of separate but inter-connected pieces which ruminate on the stories/homeland(s)we carry, bury and create. A compassionate and hopeful collection of poems from an exciting new #canlit voice that one will want to return to and savour over and over."

 —Salma Hussain, The Temz Review

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"Underlying each of these seemingly disparate islands in the collection is blood and a heart that runs against the destruction of a homeland, be it by military means or environmental ignorance, and it provides a valuable viewpoint to what takes place outside and within a Western society that often dilutes, minimizes, or ignores different encounters."

—Bryn Robinson, The Miramichi Reader

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