Brooke Sahni is the author of Divining which won the Orison Chapbook Prize. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines such as Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere. She lives in New Mexico.

Other poems by Brooke Sahni in Verse Daily:
January 8, 2021:   "To the Girl Who Cried Over Grass" "If this is for her, then this is for all..."

Books by Brooke Sahni:

Other poems on the web by Brooke Sahni:
Two poems
"The Body of the Guru"
"The Sensuous Woman by J"
Two poems

Brooke Sahni's Website.

Brooke Sahni on Twitter.

About Before I Had the Word:

"Before I Had the Word invites us to consider what is essential and what is sacred: language, the body, pleasure, faith. It invites us to consider who we are, how we inhabit ourselves, how words—'words that give and words that take away'—shape our experience. There are poems in this book that are etched in me now. Poems I'll return to again and again. Poems I'll teach. Poems I'll share with my own daughter. This book is a gift."
—Maggie Smith

"How often do I read a debut collection to find myself left breathless by the beauty and craft of the poems? This is the case for Brooke Sahni's Before I Had the Word, an exceptional collection of poems with pens in two worlds—Jewish and Sikh—and unafraid to mix faith with real life, with the body and sexuality, with loneliness, family, and grief. Throughout the book, there is meaningful questioning along with a profound understanding that we are sacred and that art is sacred. Sahni writes, why would god make an object/that can't be touched when, already, I've touched so many beautiful things? These stunning poems go deep—to a soul level where they bring the reader in and share the holy here the world around us. You will be better for reading these poems, I know I am."
—Kelli Russell Agodon