Neither Created Nor Destroyed — Zara Jamshed
Neither Created Nor Destroyed explores the joy of “contradiction” in queer/trans-Muslim identity, lessons from the laws of thermodynamics, and diasporic longing. In their debut collection, poet-engineer Zara Jamshed draws on memoir, theater, chemistry, and physics to convey a queer Muslim disabled experience of global pandemic, religious practice, and relationships to family and lineage. This poetry book embodies the interconnected threads of culture and science, racism and environment, personal and communal justice, and the potential to remake hegemonic systems and structures. Jamshed uses the theatrical framing of ancestral visitations to explore chaotic and fragmented identity, journeying from the frayed gendered experience of Pakistani-American and Muslim diaspora from a post 9/11 New York City to the Bay Area to a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.
Neither Created Nor Destroyed explores the joy of “contradiction” in queer/trans-Muslim identity, lessons from the laws of thermodynamics, and diasporic longing. In their debut collection, poet-engineer Zara Jamshed draws on memoir, theater, chemistry, and physics to convey a queer Muslim disabled experience of global pandemic, religious practice, and relationships to family and lineage. This poetry book embodies the interconnected threads of culture and science, racism and environment, personal and communal justice, and the potential to remake hegemonic systems and structures. Jamshed uses the theatrical framing of ancestral visitations to explore chaotic and fragmented identity, journeying from the frayed gendered experience of Pakistani-American and Muslim diaspora from a post 9/11 New York City to the Bay Area to a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.
Neither Created Nor Destroyed explores the joy of “contradiction” in queer/trans-Muslim identity, lessons from the laws of thermodynamics, and diasporic longing. In their debut collection, poet-engineer Zara Jamshed draws on memoir, theater, chemistry, and physics to convey a queer Muslim disabled experience of global pandemic, religious practice, and relationships to family and lineage. This poetry book embodies the interconnected threads of culture and science, racism and environment, personal and communal justice, and the potential to remake hegemonic systems and structures. Jamshed uses the theatrical framing of ancestral visitations to explore chaotic and fragmented identity, journeying from the frayed gendered experience of Pakistani-American and Muslim diaspora from a post 9/11 New York City to the Bay Area to a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.
Praise for Neither Created Nor Destroyed
“Steeped in hard-earned wisdom, Zara Jamshed’s debut collection Neither Created Nor Destroyed is an invitation to unravel and transform, to uncover alongside the speaker how ‘queerness is fucking holy.’ Ancestral magic and prayer mats, dream scapes and sex towels shine brightly amongst star-scattered skies, city streets, and open water. I held this collection close, starting it again as soon as I flipped past the last page.”
—Sarena Brown, author of i am thankful for feeling & for the first time on earth
“The structure of Zara Jamshed’s Neither Created Nor Destroyed invites the reader to join Jamshed on their journey through the tricky hallways of ancestry and identity. And so, from start to finish, we are waiting with bated breath to see what we too will learn, where we too will end up. With crisp prose and a variety of poetic forms, Jamshed leads us fearlessly, mapping out new spaces and walking confidently into new worlds. These poems offer the reader a tender and complex world, one that has all the space and time they need to love, pray, grieve, desire, and insist on existing.”
—Arati Warrier, author of Longing and Other Heirlooms
"Poet-engineer Zara Jamshed tackles the laws of thermodynamics as scaffolding for queer/trans Muslim diaspora. Under the guidance of the ANCESTORS, this magnetic dipole of a debut houses top surgery alongside the author’s journey to Umrah. A masterful book architect imbued with DIY spirit, Jamshed hangs the theatre lights on the set of their debut themselves in a torsion between poem and play. Jamshed’s lines are like patterns of light: ‘queerness is so fucking holy, so inter-/dimensional.’”
—Andrea Abi-Karam, author of Villany
“A winsome and beautiful calibration of ancestral calling, queer and Muslim magic and undoubtedly, bravado. Jamshed’s book debut is the kindle of comfort for those in chronic pain. Neither Created Nor Destroyed is a dynamic effort that enraptures narrative and experimental approaches with equal theatrical flair. What lyrical momentum in these pages! Unabashedly, this text is reflective and riotous— ‘shout indignant with my whole wingspan. / Like I didn’t want to hit you right where it hurts, America.’ The impact is resonant. In this collection, the hybrid forms meld seamlessly with hybrid interconnections of public, personal, and political experience with indelible reverence. Jamshed urges ‘the people have come / to take what they’re owed /’ Do you hear this reclamation? Do you feel this gumption? I hope so, because thankfully and incredibly, Jamshed’s book is formatted in acts and in doing so, takes evocative action for a better and more humane world.”
—Kay Ulanday Barrett, Essayist, Cultural strategist, & Poet, winner of the 2022 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Poet of More Than Organs, a Lambda Literary Finalist & Stonewall Honor Award Book
"Conversational, witty, and philosophical, Zara Jamshed somehow transforms Staten Island into a technicolor dreamscape, shows California’s lackluster compared to the holy cities, summons the knuckles of the Prophet, and jokes with the ancestors. It’s a kind of spiritual verse that Jamshed enacts, one where gender, quarantine, turmeric, loneliness, and supermassive black holes overlap into a kaleidoscope of questions and declarations. ‘Rebirth is like this. Something has to die first’ says the speaker of one poem, masterfully deadpan, but also simply telling the truth. Every life is preceded by death, and Jamshed cannot escape or excuse what came before, what time loops, the empty promises of the cosmos, or the comforts of an airport’s duty free section. The book is enlivening. It makes even abstractions and distance feel intimate, sensual, and within reach."
—Megan Fernandes, author of I Do Everything I’m Told
About the Author
Zara Jamshed is a queer, trans, disabled Pakistani American poet and engineer from New York City. They are the winner of the Penrose Poetry Prize for LGBTQIA+ writers and have work published in The Arrow, Keppel Health Review, Kiwi Collective Magazine, and the Protest Through Poetry Anthology. Zara is a 2022 Periplus Collective Fellow, an inaugural Kaleidoscope Writing Workshop participant with The Queer Ancestors Project and Still Here San Francisco, and was featured in Kearny Street Workshop’s literary arts showcase at APAture 2021. Putting their engineering degree to use, Zara currently works to bring the economic and environmental benefits of solar energy to California's low-income renters. They live in Oakland, California.
