Pangaea: Prose and Poetry by Hinnah Mian
Central Avenue Publishing (February 8, 2022)
128 pages; $16.99 paperback
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Hinnah Mian is a Pakistani American poet and author whose work has appeared in Harness Magazine, JUMP, Blue Minaret, and The Rising Phoenix Review. Her first book, To Build a Home, won silver in the Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards. She spends her time journaling, exploring, and living out her days with the love of her life — her dog, Felix. Her newest collection, Pangaea: Prose and Poetry explores the horrors and traumas inflicted on one’s body in a striking and poignant collection.
A lot of the horror in Mian’s poetry is metaphorical, and the vehicles of the poems work to explore how memory and trauma affect the body with very visceral images. For example, the second poem in the book “Welcome to My Body: A War Memorial” contains lines like:
here, under the flesh
of my heart, a man’s
corpse has settled,
decaying until it is
one with my body’s system.i am still learning how
to give a killer
a proper burial.
Lines like these explore trauma through a lens of horror, and use horror tropes to create a really striking tone for the reader.
Elsewhere, Mian uses these vehicles to make sociopolitical statements that deal with how one’s body can be colonized. For example, lines like
I know I’m American, because death is an old friend you see at the grocery stores,
the movies, church—a familiar haunting we have learned to live with.
or
as an American, death has become
as patriotic as the blood-red flags
that we are taught to respect more than
human bodies.
Here, death is personified and a very real character in everyday life. Mian taps into some universal horrors and fears in her poems to make her political points as direct and strong for readers, leaving them haunted by the specters she faces daily.
Pangaea: Prose and Poetry is a really strong collection of poetry and short prose. These are terrifying poems that tap into some universal horrors to haunt the readers. Elsewhere, Mian uses various horror tropes to discuss the traumas that plague her body. This is a very strong and striking collection of writing that horror readers will want to read.
