You Still Look The Same

This debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor is both an intimate deep dive and a humorous glance at the tumultuous decade of her forties. Through crisp and vivid language, Doctor explores mid-life breakups and dating, female genital cutting, imprints of racism and misogyny, and the oddness of sex and love, and urges us to take a second look at the ways in which human relationships are never what we expect them to be.

“In this collection, love, disappointment and possibility collide, at home and unhomed in spare, precise language.”

LARISSA LAI author of Iron Goddess of Mercy

“What pulls [these poems] together is the essential yearning for connection—in defiance of pain and grief, in spite of anger, fear, exclusion and sheer human blundering. The voices here are vulnerable, imperfect, but they are bolstered by their wry wit and an irrepressible desire to embrace life and love with all its complications.”

ADAM SOL author of How a Poem Moves

“Farzana Doctor’s You Still Look The Same unfolds in filmic moments which cluster with insight, itches like the discomfort of a hard news story, yet reads with all the intimacy of confessional memoir . . . a book of observation from a keen eye for what it means to be human in the 21st century.”

MICHAEL V. SMITH author of Bad Ideas