Its central sequence plunges the reader into the heat and dust of the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. For Amaan Hyder, the religious experience is a human one. These extraordinary, vivid prose poems capture the dreamlike journeys of unnamed pilgrims – from a woman lost in the crowd to an old man seeking refuge in the desert.<\/p>\n
Moving across forms and continents, At Hajj<\/em> grapples with the weight of tradition. What must we inherit and what do we reject? Can a figure stand in two places at once? In poems of intense memory, Hyder charts a search for belonging through the everyday pleasures of food, family and friendship. A dragonfly. A midnight feast. An ill-fitting coat. Composed in a disarming lyric that almost seems to fragment at the touch, At Hajj<\/em> introduces a distinctive, compassionate new voice in British poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At Hajj<\/i> is a book of yearning and of pulling away, of things handed down and newly made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[217,4,29],"tags":[121,97,115,163,113],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14471"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16351,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14471\/revisions\/16351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}