[04/01/25] Ghafoor, Farah: Shadow Price

House of Anansi Press, paperback

Publication Date: April 1, 2025

Publisher Marketing: Shadow Price is an urgent exploration of what it means to live and write as a young, visible Muslim woman in an era of climate crisis as her generation's future collapses around her. Traversing time, space, and body with imagery both surreal and documentary, Farah Ghafoor's debut collection interrogates personal complicity, generational rifts, and our shocking collective disregard for the environment that sustains us and every other living thing.

Borrowing its title from a finance term--"the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists,"--Shadow Price explores mortality, climate panic, and the violence of living in a capitalist society. What gives a living thing value? What is value? How do we serve existing power structures that determine the answers to those questions? Mourning the loss of the world's creatures from insects to mammoths, Ghafoor's poems also examine the urban dynamics between species with empathy and concern. Filled with both grief and hope, Ghafoor's arresting poems take aim at shifting opinion on the urgency of climate change, pushing readers to look doom in the eye, without flinching and while moving towards political change.