Description
Praise
About the Author

These poems strive to leap out of the collection. These poems build a bed, watch a cult film, and read the news. They take endless flights between the personal and the political, between the specific contours of Singapore’s landscape and the broader trajectories of global movements and inequity. But they can never find their way home.

it took me eight years, but here I am, carving, carving against my wounds until I hit the bone and start

Written over eight years, Wahid Al Mamun’s debut collection of poems is an intricate exploration of migration, memory and love, built on the intersections of private griefs and communal narratives, uttered in a voice both tender and unflinching. What God Took Your Legs Away deftly interrogates the tensions between the body, the nation and their intertwined histories, and asks what it means to write with—and against—one’s (be)longings. It’ll bring you to your knees and take your breath away.
“What God Took Your Legs Away is a luminous debut—truthful, tender, and unafraid. Wahid Al Mamun weaves memory, migration, and identity into poems that pulse with quiet intensity. This is a collection that resonates deeply, asking not only where we come from, but how we carry that knowing in our bodies.”
—Balli Kaur Jaswal, novelist

“These are poems of movement, of migration, of kindred spirits and companionship. The lines reflect a relentless flux, scintillating and sinewy; they feel hard-won, the product of a life keenly lived and keenly observed. Wahid Al Mamun has made tangible braids out of water that run straight into your soul.”
—Alfian Sa’at, playwright and poet

“A smart, interestingly varied, and beautiful collection.”
—Teo You Yenn, author and educator
Wahid Al Mamun (b. 1997) is a poet and Ph.D. student in Anthropology at McGill University. He grew up in Singapore and lives in Montréal. Wahid’s creative and academic interests lie in the intersections of migration, performance and intimacy. His poems and translations have appeared in the Cordite Poetry Review, PR&TA Journal, and QLRS, and have also been featured in installations at the Singapore Art Museum, People’s Studio, and on the MRT. He has also performed his works at writers’ festivals in Singapore and Melbourne. What God Took Your Legs Away is his debut in print.

Authors

What God Took Your Legs Away