fresher 

At the freshers week party bodies pack sweaty into free-floating
balloons. A chorus of down it from thirst you almost know. You unwillingly gulp
the cold. Mum worked Saturdays to afford you here. Puke crawls up the back of your
throat. Swallow it like that other secret. A crescendo of cheers. Celebration makes a boy
face-plant latex on a table’s edge. The climate turns blood. Crazed grin greets you red
hello
poo.
You laugh so quickly you shock yourself. The name sticks. You never resist or insist
that you are anything  but.

 

Sanah is an award-winning poet, a HCPC registered clinical psychologist, a presenter, speaker and educator. Her work is centred on compassion, troubling our colonial understandings of mental health and embracing each other’s madness. Her practice is shaped by liberation psychology, and draws on therapeutics, poetics, spirituality, and post-activism as interconnected practices to support racialised and marginalised people. Her published research is on the deconstruction of whiteness within UK clinical psychology.

Sanah won the Outspoken Poetry Performance Prize. She recently had a portfolio of poems shortlisted for The White Review, two poems shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition and Frontier Poetry Prize 2021. Sanah’s poetry has been published in Wasafiri, The White Review, Stillpoint and several anthologies, and has been featured on Channel 4 and BBC 2. The Guardian described her poetry as “an exhilarating declaration of love and an invocation to bare the soul.”  Sanah is currently writing her debut poetry collection with support from Arts Council England, and mentorship from Mary Jean Chan and Rachel Long. She was recently poet and lyricist for the theatre adaptation of The Jungle Book.