Self-Portrait With Family

In Self-Portrait With Family, Amaan Hyder traces a personal history of family and queerness. With poems that focus on coming out, the collection depicts the relationship between a son and his parents, and an immigrant family and its community in the diaspora. Featuring snapshots of conversations across dinner tables and phone lines, Hyder’s striking and beautifully precise poems bring into relief what is said and not said, the retreat from speech and the longing to hear from another.

By turns tender and skilfully observed, this collection also looks from the family home to the individual experience of the brown queer man in public spaces, searching for intimate connection whilst experiencing discrimination. Self-Portrait With Family distinctively frames such narratives of closeness and distance, exploring a range of poetic forms to draw together intergenerational familial and gay relationships, English and Urdu, the world of the family home and the world outside of it.