Poetry Alum Jaia Hamid Bashir '20 Publishes 'The Afterlife of Sweetness'

Poetry alum Jaia Hamid Bashir '20 published her debut collection of poetry, The Afterlife of Sweetness, this past February after the book received the Charles B. Wheeler Prize in 2024. The Charles B. Wheeler Prize is awarded through The Ohio State University’s literary magazine The Journal, and supports a full-length book of poetry for publication. In addition to a book contract, the awardee is gifted $2,500. The winning collection, which must be a work of original unpublished work, is selected by Kathy Fagan and Marcus Jackson, co-editors of the Wheeler Prize and editorial staff of The Journal. 

The Afterlife of Sweetness, published through the OSU imprint Mad Creek, explores the defiance of Muslim American girlhood. Influenced and haunted by past lovers, Islamic theology, Hindu and Greek epics, and many fractured selves, the work traces the process of becoming. Recalling the work of Kaveh Akbar, Frank Stanford, Rumo, and Jorie Graham, Bashir’s poems move between abandoned gas stations, The Qur’anic caves of Amman, the The American West, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and suburban America. Recurring characters include dogs, oysters, deers, goats, and maggots as Bashir explores memory, eros, and rot: what remains after dissection. Channeling detours and pilgrimage, Bashir wonders if holiness is not elsewhere but here. 

"In her adept portrayal of many contrasting subjects, settings, beauties, and griefs, Bashir creates a nuanced and fresh mode of encountering the world with all its dangers and raptures. The poems in this book are vivid, wise, intimate, and original," remarks editor Marcus Jackson. "A transfixing collection whose layers gracefully unfurl through poems that fearlessly process the physical and psychological dilemmas of existence and mortality."

Jaia Hamid Bashir is a poet raised by immigrants from South Asia and raised in the American West. In her writing, Bashir returns to the inexhaustible: the ecosystems that make us, the omnipresent pain of immigrant sorrow, the ordinary presence of cruelty, and the bewildering layered experiences of Muslim girlhood. She writes on topics like sex, hunger, cooking, the beloved, the holy, the body, and ideas of happiness, or sadness, in a world where categories so often collapse. Bashir’s chapbook Desire/Halves—a collection in English, Urdu, and Spanish—was published in 2020 by Nine Syllables Press. Bashir holds a masters of arts in Environmental Humanities from The University of Utah, and works as a teacher, lecturer, and writing workshop facilitator. 

The Afterlife of Sweetness can be purchased here.