Farzana Doctor
Biography
Farzana Doctor is a Toronto-based author, activist and a psychotherapist. She has written four critically acclaimed novels: Stealing Nasreen, Six Metres of Pavement, All Inclusive, and Seven which was shortlisted for the Trillium and Evergreen Awards. Her poetry collection, You Still Look The Same, which Quill & Quire has called “a powerful and necessary collection that breaks silences”, was released May 2022. She's currently working on a YA novel, a self-care guide and a memoir. www.Linktr.ee/farzanadoctor
Poetics Statement
“I was drawn to poetry when I was a child because it offered me a creative refuge. Later, when I learned about form and craft—things like line breaks, rhyme and constraints—it became an even more magical internal playground.
Poems help me to distill, clarify and find meaning in life, both as a reader and as a writer. I write on themes of loss, trauma, oppression, healing, sex, love and the strangeness of existence. I love how an ugly first draft will shape shift, showing me what it wants and needs to be. Poems have offered me soulful answers to questions I didn’t even know I’d been mulling over.
I will often write poems to help me make sense of the novels I write too, to sort out issues with plot, character or setting. For example, while writing Seven, I wrote poems about infidelity and female genital cutting to clarify my protagonist’s desires. A couple of these were early drafts that later appeared in my poetry collection, You Still Look The Same.
I mostly write narrative and lyric poems, but I love the vastness of forms. I often experience a beginner’s wonder as I experiment with a new poetic form.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Couples therapy
We hadn’t a clue
what to do—
it was like half the roof caved in,
frayed electrical wires
sparking slow
smoulder through plaster.
What if help had arrived
in nick of time,
a magic brigade
with those long hoses,
ladders that reached second story
—and blankets, we’d need those too—
rescuing us
from our burnt out home?
And later, fresh air
balm and bandages for burns,
a season of recovery.
Would it have made any difference?
Forty-three
By the age of forty
you’re supposed to have stopped caring
what people think—
that’s what Vogue says.
Late bloomer, I guess,
at forty-two I step into my wardrobe,
inhale dust motes, switch on light
avoid full-length mirror.
Toss every wire hanger
to floor, separate
garments too snug
for a Ladies Size Twelve body.
One bag garbage,
one bag charity,
nothing sparks joy.
On weighted down ten-speed
pedal hard to Lansdowne Value Village
drop my load,
linger long at automatic doors
leaking musty air.
I wish transformation were so easy—
who doesn’t want to keep
that polka-dotted halter top
from when you were nine,
the striped skirt Auntie
said was slimming?
Sky in my veins
In last night’s dream
tropical fish swam
just beneath my skin’s surface,
my forearm a spy hole into
an aquarium.
They flexed and floated,
tetras, guppies, a single catfish,
sea plants swayed in the current,
a view into
an interior universe.
One winked at me
an angelfish,
veiltail waving sultry,
she taught me
to part my lips,
learn to breathe
underwater.
I awoke unafraid
for if there is an ocean
in my limbs
there must be
sky in my veins.