Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

The poems were poignant, deeply moving, and a raw look at how love and loss often mingle in the same space.

"Home / means the warm seat of your father's old car / means a room with sunlight and no furniture / means everything has ended"

There were some really nice poems in here! Overall I enjoyed the aesthetic of this book and the different ways that some of the poems were presented.

Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to review this book.

The collection tackled striking things that some did resonate on me and I really did appreciate that.

The writing is okay and could have been better I think especially when it comes to the consistency of the pacing and flow.

Overall this is a good read.

This book was pretty okay. Poetry is one of my favorite things. It helps ease the pain and helps to understand what others are going through. I feel poetry is a way to express Someone’s deepest thoughts and I definitely thought this book did that.

Noor Unnahar captivated me with her poetry collection, Yesterday, I was the Moon. It was a beautiful piece of work, which I enjoyed and loved reading. The love I developed for her poetry made me pick up this book.
Unfortunately, this book did not intrigue me the way her previous book did. I couldn't get into the book. So, I can't say I enjoyed reading this book.

This was not the best poetry i’ve ever read but it was okay. To me the poetry felt flat, like there wasn’t a lot of emotion to me. I couldn’t feel what the author was trying to portray in her words.

I loved the visuals in this compilation - but something in the poetry itself was off for me; I loved many of the messages, but whether it was form or word choice, I didn't find myself compiled to read more.

However, I think lovers of poetry, especially of a visual nature, will enjoy this one!

This poetry collection was just ok for me. I felt that much of what was on the page didn't fully develop or felt disconnected. Many of the poems seemed like they were incomplete. Few of the works I read a couple times because I was able to emotionally connect to them. Another I did appreciate was the images throughout the book, they added some life to the collection.

Thank you to NetGalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for my eARC in exchange for an honest review.

“A poet’s heart is a populous grave. Bodies turned stories turned / guilt turned into a mouth. I am trying to be lonely again.”

—Noor Unnahar, [A Poet’s Heart]

In New Names for Lost Things, Noor Unnahar’s newest collection of poetry and visual art, she speaks in her own inimitable voice about the achingly familiar: love, loss, grief, death, memory, and forgetting. She writes with emotional clarity in an economy of language that doesn’t waste words. This collection is exactly what it needs to be, nothing more and nothing less, and that is the highest compliment one can pay a poet.

Major themes recurring throughout New Names for Lost Things include family memory, the opportunity cost of our chosen versus our lost or unchosen futures, and the way(s) in which what we choose to keep, both material and immaterial, come to define us not only to ourselves but to the rest of the world. While Unnahar’s first collection, yesterday i was the moon, was luminous in its own right, New Names for Lost Things is in a category entirely its own. Put simply, if yesterday i was the moon were a single star, New Names for Lost Things is its own galaxy. This is one of the best collections I’ve read this year and I want everyone I know to read it.

I gotta confess I found the works of Noor Unnahar by mere happenstance, scrolling down on Pinterest and I enjoyed the quality and content of her works, as well as being namesakes. Her signature collage-style visual art caught my attention and I was pleasantly surprised by reading her latest poetry book, "New Names for Lost Things".

It was a powerful combination of poems on loneliness, grief, family, city life and the shadows of missed expectations. I've always thought poetry can be such a vessel of the emotional state and as well a beacon to light our ways even in the midst of dark feelings. Unnahar made such a great job blending a number of emotions in these poems, focusing perhaps on grief and loneliness a little bit too much for some but I thought they were enjoyable.

Having the collage art present between pages created a good combination with the feeling the poems had. It's also vibrant the way she wears proudly her heritage - a Pakistani female poetess - and opens the door to let us appreciate her roots and how they are part of what she is.

There are some quotes that I found interesting when talking about grief, like this one:

"May your grief find a dark fine door ajar and leave."

This sounds like something we often do in society, looking at grief as something you have to get over it and keep moving on, but like Vision and Andrew Garfield just mentioned this year, perhaps we don't ever get over it completely and learn to live with it. Perhaps grief is indeed love persevering and unexpressed love to who or what we lost, and we just find the way to keep moving with it.

Nevertheless any potential conflicts one might have with the quotes from it, I think this book and its poems are a good tool to bring up conversation about these topics and reflect on them. I recommend taking a look at it!

New Names for Lost Things by Noor Unnahar was released on October 19th, 2021 both in physical and digital formats. Thank you NetGalley and Noor Unnahar for the ARC!

"Home / means the warm seat of your father's old car / means a room with sunlight and no furniture / means everything has ended"

I thought this was a really lovely collection from a contemporary poet.

Thank you to Netgalley for a free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I'd like to thank Andrews McMeel Publishing, Noor Unnahar and NetGalley for providing me a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Why this book didn't work out for me and received 1.5 stars (rounded up to 2)?
Personally, I think the cover of this book is a hit, and the author seems nice. I felt sorry for the things she's been through and I appreciate that she prays for her and the people around her.

I also enjoyed that throughout there are some gorgeous pictures with added elements and words, they were uniquely made.

But what was the miss for me and made me feel bad while reading this was that I completely felt in a mist. While reading this poetry collection I felt constantly like the author shared stuff and expected the reader to understand what it meant. Yes, it did had a lot of beautiful expressions and the word "moon" was there a lot, which is my favourite element. But even so, her message to the reader was hidden, only known by her.

Here / you name your own loneliness / I have named mine Clementine / we forgot it at a store last night / it grew two legs and ran outside / your loneliness is called Asparagus / none of us ever learned to spell it right / but you do not leave it behind / I keep a pocket dictionary / to name everyone's loneliness right / my mother's - named after roses / my father's - rhymes with flight / if you don't want to name it / call it [a thing to remember] / call it [a purple plastic knife]


I just couldn't understand what she was trying to say, there were a lot of random things I couldn't catch. Maybe it is my methodic brain that doesn't get this artistic creation. But for me, personally, was a miss.
Also, there were barely any rhymes. I don't say that rhymes are an absolute must (I myself enjoyed poems without rhymes), but there's always a pleasure in them, which here kind of lacked.

In the end there was a glossary with terms and their meaning (also with the poem it was from), which I enjoyed pretty much.

One poem that I liked better was [Part-Everything Daughter].

I loved this book. The overall vibe of this book is very pleasant and beautiful. There were a lot of poems that touched my heart. The language is good and simple. A lot of poems will make you think deep, while a lot of them will make you feel wowed by the beauty of it.

"I'm scared of abundance / even of love / even of loss"

4.5 ✨

Noor Unnahar created a beautiful poetry collection about love, loss, and inheritance. New Names for Lost Things not only has a gorgeous cover but the contents are even better. It feels so hard to put into words the experience I had with this book, so all I can say is it felt like home and memory and childhood and growing up and gaining and losing.

Here is a list of my favorite poems:
- From My Forgetfulness
- Reverse
- My Mother Asks about Love
- A Lonely Jon
- A List of Words That Are Shapeshifters: Part II
- An Abandoned To-Do List
- Eyes of the Present
- History of My Family
- A Twisted Narrative of My Dismay

The vibe of this book is amazing. However, the poems are not.
The pictures and the layout is beautiful as well. Everything in this book is great except for the poems. Somehow I enjoyed reading it but did not understand the poems. They were not deep, some things resonated with me cause they reminded me of memories but the poems really fall short.

"A personal tragedy
This unstitched loneliness keeps bleeding out of my hands. I was always ready to be someone else. To be remembered like a fabricated war history. Reunion with myself remains a personal tragedy. But to be a poet without being tragic would have been quite a shame."

'Dawning
You were so protected once -
it almost made you ungrateful. Look what
safety does to bodies reliant on it. I could
have been something else. A cobalt sparrow
on a withering tree. A fragile pearl on a cashmere coat.
An unnamed star adjacent to the moon. But I was given this life. Too many wants stitched inside a warm blood house. I could have left it behind. But I was given this time."

"I am grateful for everyone who had power but didn’t exercise it on me."


"May your grief find a dark fine door ajar and leave."

These are the poems and words that truly resonated with me.

*I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion. All thoughts and opinions are my own - this is not a spoiler free review*

This collection for me was beautiful, however, I connected most about the poems centered around grief and loneliness. There is something thought provoking in the way that the author addresses these concepts, as they are something innate to humanity. There is pain in grief and heartache in loneliness.

The piece that stuck out to me most was titled "Arrival of Love" ; this piece struck me because there is joy that experienced alongside grief, and sometimes that joy grows so large that grief knows it not longer has a place in ones heart. I really enjoyed reading this, especially at a time in my life where loneliness and grief were at the forefront of my mind daily. It was hard to vocalize my thoughts but thing collection of poems helped me understand them better.

This is a very personal poetry collection. There were several photographs and illustrations (some of them with text) throughout the book which wrapped it up really nicely. I did enjoy reading the poems, they're are some really lovely ones, but overall the book didn't amaze me. Rating: 3/5 stars.

The book was visually very pleasing but just seemed very sloppy compared to her previous book. For some reason it didn’t seem like it was finished, like it wasn’t edited enough and it wasn’t the final copy. There were a few good poems, but I had a hard time reading this book overall.

I do adore Unnahar and her writing in her previous book and would not recommend anyone against reading her work but this was just a style I personally was unable to relate too – it didn’t make me feel and it didn’t make me want to keep reading.

This book sounded very promising when I first read the description which is why I opted in, but the poems are written in a very particular format and it was not my cup of tea. The themes I noticed throughout this book are: loss, loneliness, grief, family, losing and finding yourself. Many of the poems in this book seemed incredibly repetitive and it felt as if she was more concerned about quantity rather than quality.

Again, she is a very talented writer and this is just my personal opinion on this book. I would recommend others to read for themselves before passing judgment.

*I was given an ARC copy from the Publisher through Netgalley.*

This was such a delightful read, i loved the inclusion of loneliness, grief, loss, and family. I would have preferred if there wasn’t a general overlap in the vocabulary and phrases used, it took away from the mystical writing of the poem.