In Sanna Wani’s poetry collection Lantern, daughterhood, place, and a rich emotional landscape come together to think through craft, the meaning of language and its possibilities, and what it means to exist in relation to the world. Divided into four sections, this collection seeks to examine what it means to make a life as a poet, how solidarity and recognition function, and the larger sociopolitical and historical structures we exist in relation to. In poems that are precise and sharp, the speaker of this collection consider what it means to belong to oneself, to place, to family, and more.
In this interview, we discuss intertextuality, community, history, and more.
Vika Mujumdar (VM): One of the things that struck me as I was reading the collection was the deep and vast network of intertextuality—thinking about the epigraphs as well as the after poems. Could you talk about how you see influence and intertextuality in your own work?
Sanna Wani (SW): For me, poetry can’t exist without community. So fundamentally, to become a better writer, you always have to be a good reader. And recently in my life, the desire and intention to read well is inextricable from writing, and in fact in some ways more important to me. What we read and how we’re in community with other texts creates the basis for how we then contribute to how poetry is in the world. There’s a hubbub around your first book where you’re showing people what you can do. But in the aftermath, and in approaching this second collection, I was thinking a lot about what craft does or why it does what it does.
VM: Building on that, thinking about the structure of the book, how did you choose to approach organizing the collection in four parts?
SW: It happened naturally. I took a look at what I was writing, and there were a lot of love poems. There were a lot of craft poems. So those are the two anchors of the book. And I actually struggled with the section called “Ethos.” That happened a bit more slowly. Same with “Faith.” I think I was trying to understand what these other two themes were, or why they were appearing. They were four things that I was really thinking about during the time that the poems were written.
VM: Each of the sections except “Grief” opens with a poem that has a date as a title, and I’m curious about how those poems came to me and your choices in making those poems the first in their respective sections.
SW: Those are all journal entries. They’re directly from my own personal journals and writings, and they’re just little pieces, except for one of them, which was in a letter. There was a feeling I had, when I was making this book, that I wanted it to be as grounded as possible. I wanted it to be very spare and without adornment.
VM: Daughterhood and family forms a large part of this collection, both in relation to the personal and in relation to the historical. How do you see daughterhood and its role in your poetry, and also its relationship to place and history?
SW: Daughterhood is so complicated. For me, there are a lot of layers to how poetry gets made, and it’s very personal. There were a lot of things happening in my personal life that shape the conceptual or political themes of the collection, and one of the really important things that was happening was that I was contesting what it meant to be a daughter, or how I was going to be a daughter, and how I was going to be a person amongst and in conversation with that. I have a very loving and very complicated family, and so I was working through that both interpersonally and in terms of the choices that I was making for my life. I was working through the heft of how I was going to live.
VM: There’s a set of four poems where the titles continue into the next poem: “When My Parents Chose Not To Love Me Anymore,” “I Was Left With Silence Instead of a Family,” “When My Parents Chose to Love Me Again,” “I Entered a Season of Return.” How did that set of poems come to be?
SW: That was originally a suite of poems, which were separately titled with “When.” And one of my lovely editors, Leslie Joy Ahenda took a look at them and was like, well, these are continuing a conversation with each other, and then I went back to them and more intentionally brought them together.
VM: This is a collection that is so place-based, not just in an immediate ecological sense but also politically—what it means to exist in relation to a place. What were some of the places you wrote these poems in? What were some places that shaped you and your poetry?
SW: The two anchors of my life are Srinagar, Kashmir, and Toronto, Ontario. I was born and grew up in Canada, but my family has a long, continuous relationship with Kashmir, and I spent most of the pandemic in Kashmir. The very first poem of the whole book, that journal entry of September 2020, was when I was in Kashmir. The majority of the poems were written between October 2021 and 2025. A lot of them are more based on living in a Western country but also visiting home and the relationship to home. Speaking to your question on daughterhood, my relationship to home was changing a lot. A big piece of the puzzle in terms of place is also people—for me, a really important person who was changing my experience of place was my now husband. That was changing Toronto in its entirety as well. The city felt totally new. And at the same time, my changing relationship with family made Kashmir feel totally new as well.
And then, of course, we can’t talk about politics or place without thinking about what was going on in the world and how devastating, complicated, and life changing that was as well, right? October 7 changed a lot about what it means to live in Toronto and in this imperial state. All those personal and broader political themes came together.
On another level, there was a walk I took a lot in my own neighborhood. There were catalpa trees I saw every day. There was the ecology of the very small neighborhood where I was living for the majority of editing this collection, Islington Village in Toronto. That was really impactful too.
VM: One of the poems that stayed with me was “The Escalators.” The poem discusses what a periphery means, and what it means to be on a periphery. How do you understand the concept of a periphery and how it plays a role in your poetry?
SW: That poem is after Mary Oliver. I was writing it when I was reading like a million of her books, and so I feel like whatever answer I give now, it’s important to harken back to her because I was really deep in her archive at that point. The first thing I thought of when you asked me that question was—because of reading Mary Oliver so much—the periphery of city and wild. I felt like I was spending a lot of my time not just on the periphery of the city, but also thinking a lot about what it means to be on the edge of two worlds, and that’s a concern I have with a lot of the different themes in the collection. What does it mean to be straddling two places or two modes of being, both the ecological and the city? For me, always in my mind is also the life I made here and the life that I have made in Kashmir. The periphery is where I feel like I spend so much of my time. To be on the periphery is a very poet thing to do. We’re all kind of perched on the edge, looking over both sides of whatever we are contemplating.
VM: Language plays a large role here, concretely in terms of languages we speak, but also the role of poetry as language and the section on craft that opens the collection. Could you talk a little bit about your relationship to language and how it comes through in your poetry?
SW: I went to the University of Pennsylvania for a short amount of time before I dropped out. There’s a famous poetry teacher there named Al Filreis, who was always saying that poetry does what language cannot. For me, poetry is a matter of escaping everyday language. I also think of Zoe Imani Sharpe, who in a workshop once said that language is this material we spend so much of our days in. We’re spending all of our time—like we’re talking to each other right now—using language. We go to the grocery store and use language. We read all the time. It’s a very mundane, empirical thing, as much as it can then be elevated into craft. But it’s very difficult material to work with. Poetry is a really useful tool to harvest from language something a bit more ephemeral, strange, beautiful, glimmering, and so I think poetry has been a very important tool in that sense for making language more not just livable but more spiritual as well.
VM: Thinking about the poems “The Sun” and “The Sky,” which are the most directly visual poems in the collection and are also very much in conversation, how did you approach writing those? How did those poems come to be?
SW: Visual poetry, as much as I love it, is a fleeting romance for me. It only visits every so often. Those poems were originally very small poems. They were just a little line. Like most people, I have a document where I put little lines. And one day, I was just pulling them out, and it was during the editing process, and I wondered: what if I just repeat this? And the other person who edited the book, Kevin Connolly, encouraged me to keep going. So then, it was just a matter of time before I realized I wanted the meaning of the poem to be the form. I wanted the form of the poem to be more present. Once I carved out the shape of the first one, the second one came very easily.
VM: I found your poem “Lullaby for Gaza” particularly interesting, and I’m thinking about it in conversation with the poems that are more directly about history and about Partition. How do you see the relationship between questions of place and solidarity and recognition in relation to ongoing historical violence, and how do you approach that in poetry?
SW: I find those poems to be some of the most vulnerable and difficult. I think of that poem, the Partition poem, and even the poem “The Beer Store,” which is looking at unhoused people in the city or people struggling with addiction. They’re attempts. I struggle with how to write poetry about really violent ongoing political reality. The limits of poetry is something I was thinking about a lot as I was writing and attempting those poems. Fundamentally, I think they are made of failure, right? Poetry, as much as it can be, is an achievement of language, it is also fundamentally a failure of language. So for me, “Lullaby for Gaza” was especially about putting aside my own ego, and being okay with failing. In many ways, I still don’t like the fact that I wrote it, and I generally don’t like when people write poetry about political horror. I find it to be in very poor taste. It can go wrong so easily. It’s a very difficult thing to do, especially when it’s not your own lived experience. But at the same time, I was listening to other writers and scholars, some of whom were Palestinian, others who were Kashmiri, and others of different lineages, who were all talking about the importance of not doing nothing. All this to say, I reconciled myself with making an attempt and being comfortable with the limits and the failures of my attempt and trying to inscribe that into the poem itself. There’s a line in the poem “Lullaby for Gaza”: “[…] in front of reality / art disgusts me [.]” It still does, and I think that that was what made it feasible to write.
With the Partition poem, I was thinking a lot about the romantic visions we have of pre-colonial time. I was contesting with myself, in that poem, and understanding my own jealousies and the nostalgia and sentimentalism that was misplaced. With the political poems, I’m often trying to think on the page. Maybe that’s why they feel so vulnerable. Because it’s a thinking that’s still evolving and it is also inextricable from political action and political life.
VM: Who are your influences as a poet, and how did they shape the collection?
SW: For this collection, I was really influenced by my friends and my community of poets here in Toronto, and a few poets online too. Hua Xi, who is a wonderful American poet, has a spareness and lightness to her poetry that was really influential for the collection. Bahar Orang, who is the author of Where Things Touch, a really powerful book on beauty, which has a political heft and rigor. Chimwemwe Undi: he’s the author of Scientific Marvel and based in Winnipeg, and so good at writing about her city, and love. I was just really looking around and trying to stay as close to home as possible. I feel very lucky to make my life with people and poets that I admire a lot. But then there’s Mary Oliver, of course. I was really deep in her oeuvre.
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Sanna Wani (she/her) is a Kashmiri-Canadian writer, editor and translator living in Etobicoke, an Anglicized word originating from the Mississauga First Nation word “wah-do-be-kang” (also spelled as “wadoopikaang” or “Adobigok”), which translates to “place where the alders grow.”
Her debut collection won the 2023 Trillium Award for Poetry. She is the creator and host of the podcast, Poet Talk; Poetry Editor at The Ex-Puritan; and Publicity Manager at Between the Lines. She loves daisies, pottery, and her dog, Juniper.
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Vika Mujumdar is a writer and critic based in Philadelphia. She was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India, and holds an MA in Comparative Literature and an MFA in Fiction from UMass Amherst. A 2025-2026 NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow, her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Public Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
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