Saba Husain is a Pakistani-American poet. Her first full-length poetry collection is Elegy for My Tongue (Terrapin Books, 2023). Her work can be found in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, On the Seawall, Puerto del Sol, Third Coast, and The Shore, among others. Husain is a 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2023 Perugia Press finalist, and a 2021 and 2020 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize finalist. Her awards include first place in the 2022 Spring Equinox Hot Poet Poetry Contest, the 2020 Editor's Choice Award from Lamar University Press, and the 2014 Lorene Pouncey Award at the Houston Poetry Fest. Husain was selected to collaborate on a poetry film which was shown at the 2024 Reel Poetry Festival in Houston. She works a day job and has served on the board of Mutabilis Press since 2019. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston.

Other poems on the web by Saba Husain:
"The Artificial Lake"
"The Missing Planet"
"Late December and It's Not Cold Yet"
"When Dolls Were Made of Paper and Sugar Water Was a Tonic"

Saba Husain's Website.

About Elegy for My Tongue:

"Saba Husain's deft, dexterous new book of poems, Elegy for My Tongue, glides across a vast landscape where the past, present, and future dwell side-by-side. Like family photographs hanging on a wall-though taken years apart, we experience them all at once. In myriad forms and often deceptively simple statements, she explores lived, collective, and thwarted memories in compressed language that changes direction like a flock of starlings. I was especially knocked out by her sweeping range of diction-from the classic and formal to the familial and colloquial."
—Jennifer Knox

"In Saba Husain's Elegy for My Tongue, the everyday is always in conversation with the enormous-with the complexities of immigration, national identity, mortality, language and faith. The simplicity of a grandmother helping her grandson study for a test becomes a meditation on family history, discovering how "paper remembers a steaming cup of black tea/ with cardamom and milk, / and the glide of a fountain pen." Or a clothesline whipping in the wind, "flinging clothes stiff from the sun/ into the air like/ mammoth butterflies," leads to the knowledge of the private self within the enormity of family and history, the self that almost wants to be revealed. This book spans nations and languages, generations, and the tiniest moments of insight and discovery. Saba Husain writes with musical intelligence, with grace and clarity that seem almost effortless. This is a terrific book, one that I will return to with pleasure."
—Kevin Prufer

"From Lahore to Texas, tradition to adaptation, and memory to discernment, Saba Husain's poetry celebrates the persistence of one's spirit in a world of turmoil and harshness. From the legacy of grandparents to the wondering of grandchildren, the poet gives us an entire world, exquisitely rendered with humility, precision, and artfulness."
—Ron Slate