Sanam Sheriff's HUM and the Poets Who Sing a Body Into Being

Nine months before publishing their debut collection, poet Sanam Sheriff lay on a surgeon's table to have their breasts removed. "A surgeon cut into my chest to remove my breasts because this is what I had come to want and need," Sheriff writes in a new essay on trans poetics. The years leading to that moment, they recall, moved through "discomfort into shame" toward "a vast estrangement" — until poetry offered a way forward. "In this wildness of abjection, trans poetics offered me a language upon which my future reflection could lean."

The essay accompanies HUM, Sheriff's first poetry collection, published by University of Nebraska Press. The title carries a double meaning rooted in the poet's mother tongue: in Urdu, hum means both "we" and "I"; in English, it is a gesture of sound. "When we hum a tune, we are not replicating speech, but approximating sound," Sheriff writes. "I only write when alone because I need to sound out each line in order to arrive at the next. I am following the impulse of music, trusting that it will bring me to meaning."

How does poetry fail — and why does that matter?

Sheriff's argument turns on a paradox: poetry works because language cannot. "Sentences will always fall short of capturing the true intricacies of our human life, our natural world," they write. Lyric, "unbridled by the laws of grammar," presses toward what grammar cannot hold. The essay quotes Gaston Bachelard: "Imagination is not… the faculty of forming images of reality; it is rather the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality."

For Sheriff, this is precisely the terrain of trans becoming: "imagining one's body outside the limits of its given lines."

Which poets opened the conversation?

Two books anchor the essay:

• Inheritance, the debut collection by Taylor Johnson, which Sheriff says "invited me into the conversation of trans poetics"
• Mr. Time by Aishvarya Arora

Sheriff recalls gasping at the opening stanza of Johnson's poem "Trans is Against Nostalgia": "Every day I build the boat, / my body boat, hold for the unique one, / the formless soul, the blue fire / that coaxes my being into being." Sheriff had long called their own body "my bodyboat" — and here was a stranger extending that private word into image. Later in the same poem, Johnson writes: "There is a new / language I'm learning by speaking it." Arora's lines answer in kind: "my song / only appears when it leaves me." Both poets, Sheriff argues, treat the trans body's next iteration as "a sonic mystery made legible only through its articulation."

What happens in the surgeon's office?

The essay's sharpest scene: asked how they want their scars shaped — "the way a man's pecs would frame his chest" — Sheriff is caught unprepared. "Manhood is not the song I've been singing, but boyhood is a tune still humming in my head." Arora's poem supplies the counter-music:

i'm not trying to be a man how birdsong isn't trying to be an orchestra a murmuration isn't trying to be a spray of fighter jets.

"What once felt like me alone in a surgeon's office becomes a we," Sheriff writes.

What does HUM itself conclude?

The essay closes on the penultimate poem in the collection, "Trans/figuration," which opens: "I have been made anew / like the first hour of sun / after days of rain." Sheriff frames their making as communal — coming not only from "the surgeon's scalpel and the barber's clippers and my lover's hands," but from trans poets "writing before and beside me." The poem's later lines read: "I was given a cage I have / come to see as a gift / for it is a cage I can see." The cage's bars, Sheriff writes, are "the failure of language and the narrow lines of prescribed gender" — and poetry, with Johnson and Arora, are the fists pulling them apart. The book's final gesture: "I am taking my body / beyond its shape." For Sheriff, that ongoing, public attempt — not a rehearsed arrival — is what trans poetics and the poet's life share.