Mona Arshi's debut collection, Small Hands, introduces a brilliant and
compelling new voice. At the center of the book is the slow detonation
of grief after her brother's death but her work focuses on the whole
variety of human experience: pleasure, hardship, tradition, energised by
language which is in turn both tender and risky. Often startling as well
as lyrical, Arshi's poems resist fixity; there is a gentle poignancy at
work here which haunt many of the poems. This is humane poetry. Arshi's
is a daring, moving and original voice.