How to Make Your Mother Cry

Sejal Shah is an artist, dancer, poet, writer, and teacher whose work crosses genres and disciplines. The daughter of immigrants from Kenya and India, she is the author of the award-winning essay collection This Is One Way to Dance and the groundbreaking essay on invisible disability and neurodiversity “Even If You Can’t See It.” She lives in Rochester, New York.

“How to Make Your Mother Cry is an incredible cross-cultural manifesto of word and body: What is home. What is mother. What is family. What is self. What is woman, and how do we story her.” - Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust and Verge “Urgent, intense, and intimate, the stories in Sejal Shah’s How to Make Your Mother Cry conjure memories and stir the soul. A clever and beautifully crafted collection!” - Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies“Sejal Shah has written a stunning hybrid work, and I’m in awe of its candor, risk, and craft--this is a book I will recommend to other writers, professors of creative writing, and readers of literary texts. I see Shah’s book as broadening and supporting the larger conversation of work by writers of color.” - Jon Pineda, author of Let’s No One Get Hurt“Each sentence is its own jewel box of pleasures and delights. Like works by Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde, and Claudia Rankine, this groundbreaking collection will be a touchpoint for years and decades to come.” - Rahul Mehta, author of No Other World and Feeding the Ghosts“If a queer text is an unsettled one, crossing cultures, crossing genres, then this book rescripts what we think we know. Shah is a master storyteller who keeps us knowing differently. How to Make Your Mother Cry is bold and brave. A collection for a new century.” - Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood

• [soundtrack] I. A girl walks into the forestThe Girl with Two BrothersMary, Staring at MeDicot, MonocotMandala(Divination) II. A girl is lost in the woods(Independence, Iowa)How to Make Your Mother CryWatch Over Me; Turn a Blind EyeClimate, Man, VegetationIthaca Is Never FarXylem(Everybody’s Greatest Hits) III. A girl claws her way out(The Granite State)The Half KingSkeleton, Rock, Shell Companion TextsEphemera ArchiveLiner NotesGratitudes & Ghost Tracks