1000 and 1 Poems on Love

"... imaginations are genderless wombs." - Sulaiman Addonia, The Seers

"As if we had, with our own hands, created each other's bodies out of the darkness. " - Geetanjali Shree, The Roof Beneath Their Feet

"The body has no simple theology. We reinvent and realign our constellations as we wander; our old sailing stars will not do forever." - Gabrielle Bellot, Volcano Dreams

"I almost never wept for him, I just stopped looking at the sky the way I used to." - Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation, trans. John Cullen

"She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room and trapped you in it without them. She wanted her father to know how bad she was feeling. She didn't want to get over the pain. She didn't have the energy to make the best of it. She didn't see what purpose it would serve to make the best of something in a world that felt stripped of any arrows, any direction, any sense. Who would she be making the best of it for? Herself? She didn't care about herself. Her father, who wasn't there? The living? It was the dead who needed our love, the dead who she wanted to be loyal to, the dead who needed us most. The living could take care of themselves, going to the grocery store and all that sunshine. It was the dead who needed to be held onto so they would not slip away. Who would save the dead from oblivion if not we the living? She would have to hold onto her father forever so he would not slip away." - Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

"My memory begins with my anger." - Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men