Before I Had the Word

The poems in Before I Had the Word explore the divine within the secular, mundane world, and often challenge the definition of holiness. Sahni uses her religious and cultural backgrounds—Sikhism and Judaism—as springboards from which to question notions of the ecstatic in nature, sexuality and the body. Religious and spiritual ways of knowing; the sacred in the mundane; how knowledge and story manifest in the body; language and how one shapes meaning, are also central to this work. Language, the