"Self-portrait with family" by Amaan Hyder (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Rialto, etc.

"nice legs mahmood" uses slashes, the only punctuation being apostrophes. The first 6 stanzas are 6-lined - roughly equal rectangles. The final stanza is 5-lined. Here it is, with the end of stanza 6.

i saw someone on a train eating an apple / munch mush common enough / yet uninhibited by the unpopular core / woody button to collar / only the stalk forsworn / branch tip grip provided to dangle this sinful world

It looks like the slashes replace commas or dashes, so why not use commas and dashes? And what are the line-breaks for? They seem needlessly obscure to me. Why the lofty "forsworn"? Why "i" rather than "I"? Why all this distraction from content?

“Post-independence studies (I)” is in terza rima, which doesn’t disguise the infodumpy prose any more than moon/June rhymes would.

They made their cautious way back to their hospital accommodation flat, where my mother began a generous letter home and, across from her at the kitchen table, my father sat unquestioningly sticking photos into an album given to the bride and groom as a wedding present. A photo showed generations of men, formally dressed, arranged in rows. It was said that my father’s family tree began with the prophet, so each man wore a grave look and a fez on their head

Why “on their head”? Where else would one wear a Fez? Soon, we get more info -

The distance between Hyderabad and Delhi was greater than that between London and Berlin yet Indian was as far as the geographical description went for our family in England. My parents moved from one town to another, from accommodation to a house of their own

On p.54 there's quoted prose that on p.55 is broken into 5 stanzas. Eh? Then it's more radically re-rendered in succeeding pages, and on later pages developed. p.82 uses only commas as punctuation, though even those are suppressed at line-endings.

I like "at an LGBT icebreaker ... We stood on chairs:/ we had to order ourselves alphabetically/ without touching the floor of the union./ We weaved past one another, asking names/ across the intimacy of ledges" (p.63).

Many of the poems are longer than a page. There are several braided pieces (parents vs impending lover, etc), and mentions of older men. The "coming out" anecdotes sound a little dated to me, though I guess his ancestry didn't help.