Winner of LHP’s 2019 Urgency Chapbook Competition.

Shadi Eskandani’s Contusions is a miracle of moments where time is transformed and traumatic memory collapsed. The poems’ small movements bloom beneath the skin like faith, like loss—they guide the reader across time, across realms, and ask them to consider parts of themselves that haven’t broken the skin.

—Seema Reza, author of A Constellation of Half-Lives

Hope rises from the ashes of—broken. Gratitude and grief go hand in hand. Eskandani’s searing collection invites one to witness the ritual invocation of a healing space for grief, gratitude, beauty, and the violence of putting oneself back together. In the space of exile from home one can invoke home and hope. A beautiful, heart clenching debut.

—Junie Désil, author of eat salt | gaze at the ocean

These poems carry the revolutionary heartbeat of the earth, as they search and circle and land in the place of home and belonging, over and over again.

—Annahid Dashtgard, co-founder Anima Leadership & author of Breaking the Ocean: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Reconciliation

Shadi Eskandani’s work unearths generations of wisdom carried forward from ancestors across oceans and seas. Her poetry reminds me just how much we, deeply-rooted women from the centre of the world, have carried on our shoulders, in our wombs and in our hearts. A visceral read, rich with multi-sensory visions and reflections, Contusions is a healing prayer that is simultaneously transporting and grounding.

—Sundus Abdul Hadi, artist & author of Shams and Take Care of Yourself: The Art and Cultures of Care and Liberation