Rupture Anthem

Ms. Magazine Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026 Rupture Anthem is a journey of severance, faith, and womanhood across continents. It follows an intricate, dazzling record of a Muslim girl’s becoming bracketed by the oil boom in the Arabian Gulf, the migrant abuse under the region’s restrictive kafala system that built its shining new cities, and the flowering of erotic desire against the backdrop of strict religious mores. The speaker of this stunning book journeys across countries, cultures, and languages in search of belonging and freedom. Against America’s War on Terror, its ghostly afterlives in her country, she navigates urban militarism and patriarchy, exploring what it means to be lost among your own people before ending up in the United States, where she discovers freedom is often an unkept promise. Through lyric and documentary poems that braid memory with history and feminist dignity, Rupture Anthem architects transformative acts of witness, dissent, and bodily pleasure against the systemic forces that silence.