Description

In Self-Portrait With Family, Amaan Hyder traces a personal history of family and queerness. With poems that focus on coming out, the collection depicts the relationship between a son and his parents, and an immigrant family and its community in the diaspora. Featuring snapshots of conversations across dinner tables and phone lines, Hyder’s striking and beautifully precise poems bring into relief what is said and not said, the retreat from speech and the longing to hear from another.

By turns tender and skilfully observed, this collection also looks from the family home to the individual experience of the brown queer man in public spaces, searching for intimate connection whilst experiencing discrimination. Self-Portrait With Family distinctively frames such narratives of closeness and distance, exploring a range of poetic forms to draw together intergenerational familial and gay relationships, English and Urdu, the world of the family home and the world outside of it.

Publisher Review

"Rippling with violence and desire and tenderness, Self-Portrait With Family braids a complex pattern from generational, cultural and political history. A powerful and searching poet, both experimental and lyrical, Amaan Hyder has a formal instinct and flair that can contain multitudes." -- Sean Hewitt "Self-Portrait With Family brilliantly explores the seemingly conflicting elements of a queer British-Indian identity; the strength of this collection is how effortlessly the poems meld these elements - histories, questions and languages - together." -- Tawseef Khan "In the equally tender and interrogative Self-Portrait With Family, Amaan Hyder turns the poetic lens to capture nuances of language, familial relationships, and queer desire. This collection is bright with intimate address and startling sound, emphasising the desire to communicate and the inability, at times, to be heard. Hyder reaches in and out of memory and emerges from the expanse of his questioning with the perfect gloss of a photograph." -- Alycia Pirmohamed