No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body

Asiya Wadud is a weaver of magical syllables. In her hands, language has weft and warp, words have intricate texture, and sentences unravel and reassemble as tangled webs of gold. In No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body, her sentences enfold black feminism in verse. They craft lyrical-spiritual duets with Harriet Jacobs and Christina Sharpe, with Angela Davis and Hortense Spillers, with Dionne Brand and Saidiya Hartman, with Audre Lorde and Okwui Okpokwasili. Her words wrap womanism in rhyme.

No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body sprawls, hinges on the held gaze, the long breath. In this, her third remarkable collection, Asiya Wadud begins to “peel at the seams” of what we know and how, expands the line into a field into a sea. Memory, history, and possibility, bound collectively by the hull, the wing, and the wave, resound throughout, anchored by a “migratory ‘I’” who learns, and in learning insists that whatever comes, we must live in it– atolls no more but instead, hopefully, archipelagoes.