The Art of Strangeness by Mehnaz Sahibzada is a playful exploration of shifting settings and realities. The poems drift from Lahore to Los Angeles, and from Tucson to Taif. What surfaces is a longing for the past as well as the inevitability of present alienation. Faith and beauty appear here in the contradictory spaces, where scorpions are juxtaposed with roses. The poems in the collection are also contradictory in form: villanelles and ghazals appear alongside free verse and narrative poems. The stanzas conjure luxury handbags and kitchen counters, gray hair and vampires as well as the surreal experience of aging. How does a woman inhabit her own skin when the house of body keeps shifting? These poems pose questions like this, where the strange is not a departure from the real but the very essence of it.
