Non-Prophet
Winner of the Claire Harris Poetry Prize
Raw, reverent, and bursting with searing vulnerability, Non-Prophet canvases the electric tension between devotion and doubt to gods both personal and ubiquitous, and reflects on the natural and built worlds in their claims to the sacred. Winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize, Qurat Dar’s bold debut collection explores what it is to grapple with faith that’s “just another language you’re losing, or one you never learned to speak.”
Weaving through the boundaries of language and form, Non-Prophet meditates on things “just mundane enough to be holy / just holy enough to be mundane” — the death of a bird, the cries of mid-nightmare prayers, the misplaced shame of what it is to bleed. Dar’s poems both rage and reconcile, holding gently the pieces of a fractured identity.
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I loved Non-Prophet for so many reasons: this book speaks to my own experience and history, it addresses questions of spiritual and daily life (and for many of us, those two are inseparable), but perhaps most importantly, these are exciting and immediate poems that continue the great legacy of Claire Harris. As Harris did in her poems, Qurat Dar bravely confronts a cultural imperative to silence or acquiescence with refusal; more than refusal, but response. We are the new, this poet announces, we are the unexpected. But brilliant and constant and here. — Kazim Ali, inaugural judge of the Claire Harris Poetry Prize
The poems in Qurat Dar’s Non-Prophet are all-consuming. As we hurtle towards annihilation, Dar combines rich Islamic and Sufi mythology with deepfakes and Teams lights. The poems loop and circle through destruction and renewal, diaspora and home, worshipper and worshipped. Dar paints a powerful picture of the bloody nature of Brown Muslim girlhood, and how we construct both ourselves and our notions of God. And yet, seas continue to swell and old growth forests overtake parking lots. Though this collection ends on a vision of the last days on Earth, these poems are a testament to living. — Manahil Bandukwala, author of Heliotropia
Qurat Dar’s words are much like the vision they stitch to the page; patient, meticulous, persistent. This collection is a “blooming choir” of imagery, carefully tended, that can remind us of the beauty in yet undiscovered vantages, like nutrients awaiting rot to unlock the soil’s capacity to wonder. Non-Prophet is a rare gift in the manner of its unfolding, and a spectacular example of Qurat Dar’s lyric, narrative mastery. — Tyler Pennock, author of Blood
In Qurat Dar’s Non-Prophet, faithfulness and faithlessness coalesce to create a query we meet in the epigraph: “Not Muslim, yet not heathen; who am I?” Doubt, failed bargains, and bloody lips populate the piety of this collection. With the vulnerable underbelly of belief exposed, Dar gives voice to a tired but staunch believer whose prayers are both declarative and searching. “The shape of surrender is an arch,” Dar writes. “The opposite of a eulogy is a prophecy.” Reverent toward tooth, wing, and claw, the devotee worships not only God but angels, birds, and “the conviction of trees.” Confessional and caustic, Dar practices fanaā in form, shaping poems into vessels like vases and boats. With “every day its own Judgment,” we wait with the narrator of Non-Prophet, holding onto a faith that is as painful as it is enduring. — Sanna Wani, author of My Grief, the Sun
Through Dar’s Non-Prophet, she articulates her own seriousness beneath such performative gestures, and a sense of spiritual through the everyday. — rob mclennan
Qurat Dar was Mississauga’s Youth Poet Laureate from 2021 to 2023 and the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam (CIPS) National Champion. Her poetry has been published by Arc, Room, and Canthius, and shown at the Art Gallery of Mississauga and across the TTC network.
