The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Othered by Seher Hashmi

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kirsten Kowalewski, is from Othered by Seher Hashmi (Sanjh Publications 2021).

I can’t flaunt a degree

From a foreign university
Can’t drop resounding names 
Laurels from literary community
Liaisons with Bloomsbury
Or rules, patterns, structures
Learned by heart of prosody
No tall claims to language 
I owned, made mine consciously
One-sided affair
A last-ditch effort
To find some sort of dignity
While dangling from the last 
Shabby, threadbare
About to snap off anytime 
Rung of human hierarchy
But what I have with me is
Rugged, blunt
Wired in real time 
Cutting out in middle 
Distorts, unbleeped
Living, breathing 
Writhing cut from 
Reality.

Note: Copies of Othered may be purchased from Sanjh Publications Pakistan. As very small press, they don’t have a website; orders can be placed via WhatsApp at +92-331-4686276.

seher hashmi is an expat poet/ satirist/ spoken word artist/ podcaster of Pakistani origin based in Bahrain. Two of her poetry collections called Othered & Nots hit shelves in the first quarter of the new millennium in 2021 and 2024 respectively. Her debut Othered won her the Daud Kamal Award for the best book of poetry 2021 from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. Her poems have been aired by The Poetry Place and are featured in The Poet, The Sunflower Collective, Tint Journal, etc. She has also founded a podcast for authors and poets called The Bookend.

Kirsten Kowalewski is a former school Librarian, occasional beta reader, book reviewer, and editor for Monster Librarian, an online review resource for horror and dark fiction.