Blue Exodus (PB) (2024)

Blue Exodus, Hussain Ahmed's second full-length poetry collection, was selected by Rajiv Mohabir as the winner of The 2022 Orison Poetry Prize. About the collection, Mohabir writes, "I come away with the specters of the living and passed, asking me what it means to live as a story lives, to write a life's ghost into poem." This book charts a heart's history of home, war, dispossession, and displacement, as well as the human solidarity and sacred rituals that remain despite the loss of so much else. Populated by moons and oceans and birds, as well as missiles and gun magazines, these lush poems carry profound grief but also adamantine hope.