Farah Ghafoor, Shadow Price

 

But what do I know of suffering?
This summer, we picked white blooms to last a week
in our crystal vases. Their siblings flourished safely
into berries and figs, wild as dusk.

We feasted, calling them gifts.
Even the earth is a present
if we echo it loudly enough.
Even time can serve you—

decorated in fruit and forest is, after all,
the first museum of looted treasure.

Inside our mouth lay the artist,
the wasp, which, too, was eaten
by its masterpiece. (“The Dream-Eaters”)

Award-winning Toronto-based poet Farah Ghafoor’s full-length debut is Shadow Price (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2025), a collection that wraps a first-person lyric around temporality, death, capitalism and colonialism, and the dangers of not knowing or understanding history. “The Present is reminded of its bones only when broken,” she writes, as part of “Natural History Museum,” “and then the Future is considered, its supposed desires / and plans. The Future, for whom the door is always open, / a sweet wind blowing in petals and leaves, sticks and feathers. / The same doorway through which the Present passes, / and forgets what it was doing, its reasons why.” The movement and evolution of time is a thread running through Ghafoor’s poems, articulating how it moves but in one direction, however far one looks back. “I’ve been lying for a long time,” she offers, to open “The Jungle Book: Epilogue,” “so let me tell you a story. / Despite the bravado of the dog quaking before the wall, / we can never go back to who we were.”

Set in five sections—“SHADOW PRICE,” “TIME,” “THE LAST POET IN THE WORLD,” “THE PLOT” and “THE GARDEN”—Ghafoor’s expansive and epic lyrics offer shimmering narratives, flipping between the present and the past, the old and the new, articulating time as something physical, something that can be touched, held. Ghafoor is a natural storyteller, and her lyrics offer the temperament of the ancient seer, able to discern what is long behind and ahead, all that is hidden and all that is obvious; what others simply refuse to see, if only they’d listen. “To obtain my severance package,” she offers, as part of the extended lyric narrative of “The Whale,” “I will be required / to hold my breath until further notice. / Of course, I can barely register all of this / without the aural support that my insurance did not cover.” She weaves such marvellous and magical tales, such gestures. “They have all the time in the world,” she writes, as part of “The Jungle Book: Epilogue,” “but the story must end, as all stories do.” This is an absolutely solid debut.