Sheniz Janmohamed

Sheniz Janmohamed is a spoken word artist, poet, and freelance writer based in Toronto.  She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.  Janmohamed is the founder of Ignite Poets, a youth spoken word initiative.

Poetry

Bleeding Light: Poems

Toronto: TSAR, 2010.
9th floor PS8619 .A6763 B54 2010

Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)

Bleeding Light is a collection of poems in ghazal form that traces the steps of a woman’s journey through night. She knows that in order to witness dawn, she has to travel through dusk first. Throughout her journey, she is caught between West and East, religion and heresy, love and anti-love, darkness and the knowledge of light. Each couplet is an independent thought and reflection, a pearl strung into a necklace. Bleeding Light is fraught with opposing, stark and often violent imagery heavily influenced by Sufi philosophy.

Poetry

Firesmoke: Poems

Toronto: TSAR, 2014.
9th floor PS8619 .A6764 F57 2014

Publisher’s Synopsis

Sheniz Janmohamed’s second collection continues the poet’s journey, tracing the inception and annihilation of sacred fire.  In a series of highly evocative, personal poems, Firesmoke explores the meaning of truth and self, finding them both in form and emptiness.  In her unorthodox, broadminded quest for understanding, Sheniz evokes the teachings of Sufism, acknowledges the restorative power of the Mother Goddess and honours the alchemy of nature.  Life and death do not exist without each other, just as fire produces both ash and smoke, one falling to the ground, the other rising into space.