My thanks are due to the editors at Love, InshAllah who have published an interview with me along with some very kind words about Waiting to Unfold!

Love, InshAllah is the blog associated with the book by the same name, Love, InshAllah: the Secret Love Lives of Muslim Women, an excellent collection of essays which I am delighted to have on my bookshelf. Here's an excerpt from the interview, which just went live:

LA: In Waiting To Unfold, you write about pregnancy, the birth of your son, and parenting during that first year. One day, he will go back and read this. Do you envision this moment and his response?

RB: It’s strange and wonderful to think of our son someday being old enough to read these poems. I hope that when he reads them, he sees them as a labor of love — and I hope he sees that even when I was struggling with postpartum depression, my love for him was always present and always real.

The title comes from one of the poems in the book — “Belief,” which speaks about my belief in redemption: belief that spring would comes after that long winter, and that the antidepressants would restore to me the laughter and the sense of self I remembered from my life before. That phrase, waiting to unfold, felt to me like a metaphor for so many things: the embryo curled inside the uterus, a plant curled inside a seed, my heart...

You can read the whole piece here: The Poetry of Motherhood: Waiting to Unfold. Thank you, Love, InshAllah editors!

Waiting to Unfold costs $13.95 (US, CAN) / £9.10 / €10.66 and is available at Phoenicia Publishing and on Amazon (and Amazon UK and Amazon Europe) -- though publisher and author earn more if you buy it directly from Phoenicia. Still: buy it wherever works for you.