The speaker of Sadiqa de Meijer’s Qaf’s People is shaped by overlapping mythologies, migrations, and inheritances. Geographically, the collection takes its readers from Kenya to the Netherlands to Southern Ontario, tracing concurrent diasporas, histories, landscapes, and languages that compose the speaker’s composite identity. Despite this range, the shadow of Mount Qaf, a mountain present at the edge of the visible world in Islamic cosmology, remains perceptible. Qaf exceeds its geological bounds in de Meijer’s poetry, becoming “a letter itself,” “salt in the mail,” “the rim of the burned-out tealight,” “entirely interior”: it is geography, myth, grammar, trace, and psychic condition at once. 

In the midst of these “elsewheres” that remain forever framed by Mount Qaf, de Meijer repeatedly returns to the question of scale: how diasporic life can make the intimate and the planetary feel inseparable, how memory and migration alter one’s sense of space, history, and perception itself. In “You Are Therefore Already Mythic,” she writes:

 

an image shrinking to a dot is the reverse 

of how the universe began inside the pupil of a being 

older than the stars, 

 

whose dark-flecked, subtle gaze still registers the war, the game, 

all the streets with all stalled trains,

 

The book is boldly cosmological, and her imagery possesses a verdant turbulence, a poetry of provisional transcendence, one in which beauty arises from within continual change and refraction. De Meijer’s poetry repeatedly achieves this strange expansiveness: her lines hold together the catastrophic and the ordinary without flattening either. Across the collection, suburban trains, family histories, mythic mountains, and geopolitical displacements coexist within the same shifting field of attention, giving Qaf’s People its immense emotional and imaginative reach.mRb