The Day the Moon Split in Two: A Grief Poetry Collection

By Tanzila Ahmed

My mother's face used to remind me of the moon
round and fair
the acne pockmarks like the cratered surface cheek
dimples like meteor shadows.
She was plump
a celestial body to reckon with
with gravity so powerful it could make waves

From political activist and writer Tanzila Ahmed comes a collection of poetry capturing the experiencing grief from the loss of her mother as a Muslim Bangladeshi-American woman. Written over the course of almost a decade, the poems grapple with the various stages of grief while exploring various cultural and spiritual death rituals as South Asian Muslim. This collection is evocative and reflective, especially for those grasping to make sense after experiencing grief. This is her third published poetry collection.

Praise for The Day the Moon Split in Two
"A family garden-life giver and taker. The deep upheaval and cyclical moon tides of bereavement. Flickering, fickle memory and language, and all the questions that grief grows. Especially: how do I make meaning of my mother's death against time's slow obscuring? "I am still fasting." And then the balm of this familiar, immigrant particular: an ancient plastic yogurt container, passed back and forth for years, "finding it is never yogurt inside" but magic. Taz Ahmed's The Day the Moon Split in Two is a brave, bountiful sharing."
- Kenji C. Liu, author of Monsters I Have Been

The poems in Tanzila Ahmed's The Day the Moon Split in Two convey, with great generosity and heartrending beauty, the relentless challenges of coping with grief. In writing about the sudden loss of her mother in 2011, Ahmed invites us to accompany her as she seeks a sense of healing in memory, family, art, and faith. By the end, as we fight back our own tears, or allow them to flow freely, we too come to bear witness that there is no cure for grief, that because grief is such a constant, our "joy must be louder." There is indeed a comforting thread of joy woven into the heartbreak of these poems-a joy housed in reverence and love, in a daughter's desire to honor the richness of her mother's life."
- Faisal Mohyuddin, author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children

"The Day The Moon Split In Two is an homage to Taz's mother as much as it is a reckoning with grief, an embodiment of the great caverns of loss, and a bittersweet archive of moments that may haunt as much as they must be penned, and we are so thankful they are with this collection. Fragments of memory and ritual - the poetry runs from and toward the longing, the void, the fading scent of time, the ever present voice in the wind we will into our existence - they allow us to live in the wreckage and come through with some semblance of healing, and even joy."
- traci kato-kiriyama, Navigating With(Out) Instruments

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08HTG6LS6
• ISBN13: 9798669743147
• Release Date: September 2020
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 74 Pages
• Weight: 0.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"