Lantern. Poems - Sanna Wani

Meditations on the beauty of an ordinary life

Meditations on the beauty of an ordinary life

Meditating on the beauty of an ordinary life, Sanna Wani’s second poetry collection, Lantern, explores how we fall in love and make a home. What does it mean to belong to a city, or to truly enter adulthood? Imbued with a quiet queerness, this book is a guide for living in the aftermath of familial rifts, crises of faith, political struggle, and intergenerational grief—all while remaining devoted to an idea of goodness.

A love letter to Toronto, Lantern is grounded in subway stations and city parks yet textured like watercolour and linen. Wani writes with reverence for animals, trees and flowers, but does not avoid everyday difficulties—the burnout of a 9-5; her fraught homeland of Kashmir; or the reality of Islamophobia in Canada. Wani also addresses the craft and the limits of language. Lantern is kaleidoscopic in its queries: memory, mothering and morality refract through tarot, Sufism, and psychoanalysis.

A balm and an ode, this collection places Wani in the lineage of Mary Oliver while carving her own path as both theo- and ecopoet. Taking stock of one precious life, Lantern invites us to consider our responsibilities—to ourselves and each other—and to choose who we might become.